


Almost Autumn

by m_class



Category: Star Trek: Discovery
Genre: Action/Adventure, Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Autumn, Cuddling & Snuggling, F/F, Federation Standard Sign Language, Fluff, Food, Georgiou Lives, Humor, Hurt/Comfort, Hypothermia, Joann & Philippa talking about Starfleet, Joann being analytical, Keyla & Michael talking about what it means to be human, Keyla as nervous medic, Michael heroism, More angst than anticipated, Nightmares, Philippa PTSD, Philippa sarcasm, Philosophical Discussions, Post-Season/Series 01, Seasonal, Suspense, away mission, discussion of Michael’s time in prison, hand-holding, shuttle crash, stupid humor
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-15
Updated: 2019-01-24
Packaged: 2019-08-24 00:07:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 9
Words: 33,478
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16629047
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/m_class/pseuds/m_class
Summary: Joann and Keyla's best-laid plans to celebrate the six-month anniversary of their first date go badly awry when they are assigned to an away mission that turns deadly. Imperiled and divided on an alien planet, the two halves of Discovery's away team must marshal their skills and resourcefulness to save each other and themselves--and, just maybe, give Joann and Keyla the celebration they deserve after all.





	1. Some Rescue

**Author's Note:**

> This fic takes place in the same general post-Season 1 universe I've been writing in, six months after Joann and Keyla got together in [Falling Tides](https://archiveofourown.org/works/15775800) (with the caveat that Falling Tides wasn't a Georgiou Lives fic, whereas in this one Philippa is alive and stationed on the Discovery, as a tactical consultant rather than as its commanding officer).

Except for the burning inferno below them, the planet is lovely.

Joann turns her head, staring around at the rich reds, oranges and golds of the planet’s foliage as her parachute drifts slowly towards the ground. Aside from the white of Captain Georgiou’s parachute, floating a dozen meters below her own, there is nothing but scrubby brown grass and warmly colored leaves as far as the eye can see.

She has no way of knowing whether these are deciduous trees like those of Earth, turning with the changing seasons, or whether these brilliant hues are their natural year-round colors. Either way, the coincidence of crashing onto a planet whose vegetation mimics that of the current season on Earth’s North America feels a little on the nose, particularly given Joann and Keyla’s erstwhile plans for this week. For their sixth-month anniversary, Keyla had suggested a date hitting every autumnal cliche in the book, from hot apple cider to carving a pumpkin to--if Joann could get over her aversion to coffee, and Keyla her aversion to pumpkin-flavored anything--seeing if the replicator could make them a sample size of the historic and notorious ‘pumpkin spice latte.’

For the last week, Joann’s mind has been a whirl of date preparations, from getting Sylvia to help her replicate a pumpkin that looked natural rather than artificially spherical, to planning and re-planning the perfect outfit, to carefully painting a mug with autumn leaves as a surprise six-month anniversary gift. For the last week, she and Keyla have grinned at each other in anticipation in the Discovery’s halls and spent their evenings debating pumpkin-carving designs. For the last week, they’ve been completely, irrepressibly happy.

Before being assigned to their respective away missions. Before Joann hung her new dress on her closet door in anticipation of their return. Before--

But she doesn’t want to think about that.

She has quite enough to think about inherent to her immediate situation, anyway. She’s crashed on a planet before--the joke goes that once you’re in Starfleet, you’ll be assigned to an away mission that ends in a shuttle crash sooner or later, probably sooner. That was back on her first posting, the one before the Discovery, and, though she’d counted it as the shuttle crash notch in her proverbial belt at the time, it had admittedly been more of a rough landing than a crash, the resulting damage taking the shuttle’s occupants only half a day to fix, one of them staying behind to put the finishing touches on the repairs as Joann and their commanding officer headed right on out to start on their survey mission.

This is not that kind of shuttle crash, nor even the kind of shuttle crash her older colleagues all tell stories about, hauling medical supplies and rations and injured friends from a burning shuttle before it goes up in flames. Joann and Captain Georgiou’s shuttle—and their mission with it—did not so much crash and burn as skip straight to the _burn_ part, starting to very persistently combust in the lower atmosphere. One minute Joann was still trying to get fire suppression back online, the next Georgiou was thrusting a parachute pack at her, telling her to put it on _now_.

If Joann had been the commanding officer on the shuttle, would she have made that call quickly enough to send them spiralling safely into the still, cold air as the shuttle dove for the planet’s surface, exploding into white-hot flames below them? She shivers.

As the ground approaches, swathes of color take shape into recognizable geographic features. Fortunately, the burning shuttle has landed in a clear, muddy patch of ground near a sprawling body of water. Almost as fortunately, its former occupants are drifting towards a nearby expanse of scrubby brown grassland rather than the rolling forest itself. As she gets closer to the ground, Joann runs mentally through the steps of the parachute landing fall, the fading adrenaline of parachuting from the combusting shuttle replaced by the growing adrenaline of having to, quite literally, stick the landing.

She’s parachuted before, of course, at the Academy, and practiced the parachute landing fall periodically in the gym as required by Starfleet’s training standards, but she admittedly hasn’t performed a PLF when actually landing in an actual parachute for quite a while. She takes a deep breath. _You can do this, Joann. A glorified fall onto the side of your butt is a glorified fall onto the side of your butt. You’ve done it for real, you’ve practiced, you know the steps, and you can absolutely do it._

The ground is getting closer, its autumn-like foliage reaching from horizon to horizon, taunting her with the reminder of her and Keyla’s hopeful autumnal plans. _With this ship’s luck, it just about figures that I’d get a PLF instead of a PSL._

Captain Georgiou is about to land, but Joann doesn’t watch her, instead focusing on the brown turf below, turning her feet, and pushing everything out of her mind but the task at hand. She is ten meters from impact, then five, four, three, two…

Joann hits the ground with both feet, sending herself deliberately backwards and sideways in the direction of her momentum until she is lying still on the ground, taking a deep, relieved breath through the thankfully-not-localized pain of impact. Uninjured pain is still pain, though, and she closes her eyes, wincing as she pushes away the reverberating ache.

When she opens them, Captain Georgiou is standing over her. “Lieutenant Owosekun, are you all right?”

“Never better, Captain,” Joann says, smiling at her. “Uninjured, I think. Are you all right?”

“Entirely intact.” Georgiou extends a hand, bending slightly from the waist. “You’ll forgive me for towering over you, I hope,” she adds, as Joann sits far enough up to take her hand and clamber to her feet. “My knees don’t desire to bend very far at the moment.”

“Forgiven,” Joann says, wincing as she stands and takes an experimental step forward, then another. “Everything seems to be in one piece.”

“That’s good news indeed,” Georgiou says, smiling warmly. “Especially since the same cannot be said for our shuttle.” She nods in the direction of the still-white-hot inferno, burning itself out near the edge of the water. Even this far from the shuttle, Joann can feel the heat of its rapid and thorough combustion.

She thinks again of those stories, the ones where her colleagues pull supplies out as a shuttle as it goes up in flames. All she and her captain have now are the ultra-emergency supplies packed into their parachute harnesses--a long-range communicator, a slim tricorder, a few squares of what amounts to high-tech sugary lard, a purification straw and a few strong, whisper-thin bags for water, and some miniaturized bare-bones emergency medical supplies. And their parachutes; at ground level, the air is cool even with the sun high in the sky, and the warm, lightweight parachute fabric will come in all too handy if the temperature plunges tonight.

Joann pulls out her tricorder and spins in a slow circle, scanning for any sign of technology. “I’m getting some readings from about sixty kilometers west of our position,” she reports crisply. “Outside of the tricorder’s real range, so there isn’t much it can tell us. Very faint. No warp signature, just what looks like a trace of electric energy of some type.” She swallows. “I can’t tell if it’s Starfleet.”

Georgiou flips her communicator neatly open. “Georgiou to Burnham. Do you read me?”

No response.

“Georgiou to Tilly. Do you read me?”

Nothing. Joann walks over to begin folding her parachute for transit so that she does not have watch Georgiou as she finishes, “Georgiou to Detmer. Do you read me?” or listen to the answering silence.

Part of Joann wants to yell at her commanding officer, _How can you act this calm?_ But, of course, Joann is standing here, folding her parachute, acting completely calm as well. They are calm and collected and doing their duty, because they are Starfleet officers. They have to be.

“All right.” Georgiou flips the communicator shut, sliding into her command voice. “We’ll head in the direction of those readings. This world has twenty-six hour days, so we should be able to traverse half the distance before sundown and cover the rest tomorrow.”

“Yes, Captain,” Joann responds, nodding firmly. There’s a sense of safety as well as duty in leaning into their roles as Starfleet officers, a comfort that she senses Georgiou is seeking as well.

“We’ll fold these up,” Georgiou says, nodding to Joann’s half-folded parachute and her own crumpled one, “fill our water bags, then head out.”

Joann tries to round her own voice out with calm confidence, smiling slightly. “Aye Captain. Sounds like a plan.”

She turns her attention back to her parachute, glancing periodically back to the shuttle as it slowly begins to burn itself out.

_We never did figure out what caused the malfunction. What if it’s something in the planet’s atmosphere? What if the same thing happened to the other away team? What if--_

She cuts herself off, refusing to allow her mind to roam over the worst possible scenarios.

_When I see Keyla again, I’ll have a hell of a story to tell her, and she’ll have a hell of a story to tell me. And it will give us something very interesting to talk about on our ridiculous autumnal date._

She and Georgiou originally were assigned to survey the planet’s moon, now a faint crescent in the sky above them, while Keyla, Sylvia and Commander Burnham surveyed the planet. Shortly after the other shuttle descended towards the planet’s atmosphere, however, Joann and Georgiou received a brief automated SOS call before losing all contact.

With the Discovery still three days out, their survey mission instantly turned into a rescue mission, and now their erstwhile rescue mission has turned into...whatever this is.

‘Explode in the lower atmosphere’ was definitely not part of the original, nor any subsequent, plan.

_Some rescue._


	2. This Is A Problem

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks again, so much, to everyone who commented! <3 It was lovely to hear what's working for y'all in the fic and it makes me even more excited to post the next chapters! :D
> 
> chapter-specific content warnings: joking threat of violence (the tone of the threat is serious but no physical violence is actually intended); discussion of cause-of-death statistics

The world is cold and wet and very, very loud.

Michael opens her eyes and closes them again, wincing at the sunlight and the cold spray of water and the roaring, crashing _din_ hammering through her ears and into her brain. She…

She groans.

She is…

She is here. On a hard surface. Hard, wet, cold, and now memories are coming back, the shuttle crashing into the water, carried along by the vicious strength of the current, then caught by the rocks, its damaged plating groaning, _tearing..._

Michael clenches her right hand instinctively, remembering the feel of the laser torch in her hand. She remembers climbing out of the hatch as the river roared around them and Sylvia yelled at her to be careful; remembers slicing them free of the rocks, only for the shuttle to jerk forward too fast as she freed it; remembers uncoupling her own tether before she could be dragged into the frothing water under the shuttle and leaping for the crumbling rock formation as the powerless shuttle was pulled downriver; remembers clinging to…

This.

This one solid rock, now alone in the middle of a vast, roaring river, with no shuttle in sight.

Michael rubs her eyes in the bright sunlight, peering around her. Her rock is about two meters in diameter, and sits sticking a little less than a meter out of the surface of the water, at least thirty meters from the edge of the river on each side.

Behind her, the river surges down the inclined, hilly terrain, and in front of her, it continues visibly for another half a kilometer before bending sharply and vanishing amid the boulders and tree-lined hills.

The roaring, seething current moves so fast that the water is white. Michael picks up a small twig and drops it in, expecting to watch it get whipped away downstream. Instead, it is sucked under the surface with a suddenness that makes her wince.

She takes a deep breath, assessing her current situation.

She has no boat, no rope, no phaser, no communicator, no tools—nothing but her uniform and the bare, mostly-dry rock she is sitting on.

There is no visual or audible sign of Sylvia, or of Keyla, or of the shuttle.

She peers from the rock to the shore on one side of the river, then on the other, looking for some pattern in the water that could indicate other rocks submerged just below the water’s surface. But there is nothing but the harsh lines of the speeding, cutting current.

Settling onto the center of her rock, Michael takes deep breath.

_This is a problem._

 

It may have been an hour, or maybe longer, when Michael opens her eyes from her concentrated meditation on options for escape—there aren’t any—at the sound of a shout from the riverbank. Her heart soars with relief at the sight of Sylvia and Keyla standing next to each other, entirely intact.

Sylvia cups her hands around her mouth, yelling something. From the barely-discernible movement of her mouth and the snatches of sound that reach Michael, Michael thinks that one of the words might be ‘you,’ but beyond that, it is incomprehensible.

“WHAT?” she yells back, cupping her hands around her mouth in turn.

Sylvia opens her mouth, then closes it again as Keyla nudges her and signs in Federation Standard Sign Language, Are you injured?

No, Michael signs back. Just a few bruises. I uncoupled my tether and held onto the rock before I could be hit or dragged.

Good, Keyla signs back. The shuttle--kilometers downriver--so we’ll get power back and then--out of there.

What? Michael signs back, squinting.

Keyla signs more expansively, THE SHUTTLE WASHED ONTO SHORE TWO KILOMETERS DOWNRIVER. WE LOST MAIN POWER, AND A LOT OF TECH, INCLUDING EMERGENCY POWER CELLS, WAS DESTROYED OR WASHED AWAY, SO WE’LL GET POWER BACK AND THEN BEAM YOU OUT OF THERE.

OKAY, Michael signs back. THANK YOU. ARE YOU TWO INJURED?

WE ARE BOTH FINE. FIXED SYLVIA’S MINOR CONCUSSION. YOU SAVED THE SHUTTLE.

GOOD, Michael signs.

THERE’S A NATURALLY-OCCURRING FIELD JAMMING COMMUNICATIONS, Sylvia adds. THE FIELD ALSO MEANS THE TRANSPORTER NEEDS MORE…

She pauses for a moment, then makes a self-created sign that Michael can only interpret to mean “oomph.”

IT MAY TAKE US SEVERAL HOURS TO FIX THE TRANSPORTER, she finishes. WE WILL BRING YOU SOME SUPPLIES THEN GET TO WORK.

Two thoughts run through Michael’s mind at Sylvia’s words. The first is that, though she isn’t exactly sure how Sylvia and Keyla plan to _get_ the supplies to her, even off the top of her head she can think of a few half-formed plans involving ropes and physics that could successfully send light objects the proper distance, so she’ll assume Sylvia has it all figured out. The second is that, given that Michael is a young, healthy, and essentially uninjured Starfleet officer, Sylvia and Keyla’s decision to take over an hour of time _away_ from fixing the transporter to first send her supplies she doesn’t even need at the moment heavily implies...

DO YOU HAVE ANY SUPPLIES YOU’LL NEED BESIDES THE OBVIOUS? Keyla signs.

NO, Michael signs back.

Implies that ‘several hours to fix the transporter’ might be a seriously lowball estimate, and that even if Sylvia isn’t going to say so, as it were, aloud, now they all know it.

TAKE CARE, Sylvia signs, turning as though to leave. But Keyla takes a step forward, planting her feet right at the edge of the water and staring Michael down.

M-I-C-H-A-E-L, she signs.

WHAT? Michael asks. Keyla taking the time to spell out Michael’s name, rather than use the quick, simple sign for ‘Commander,’ seems...well, she isn’t sure exactly what it seems. Months ago, it would have seemed ominous, but her relationship with Keyla has improved since they finally talked after Keyla supported Michael’s second and final mutiny, and Michael’s cautious...she thinks she could even call it a friendship again; crewmate-ship, anyway...with Keya has slowly strengthened as they have worked alongside each other, sharing mutual friends, sharing duty shifts, rebuilding trust.

But her body language right now is making Michael question that. Biting her lip, she waits.

I KNOW THAT YOU KNOW AS WELL AS I DO HOW DANGEROUS MOVING WATER IS.

Michael does know. Starfleet search and rescue training emphasizes that the pressure and force created by fast-moving water make it a leading cause of death, when it comes to phenomena in the natural world, for both civilians and Starfleet personnel. Safety in rivers, waterfalls and swimming holes has increased over the centuries only due to the existence of transporters; in a situation where transporters are unavailable, the statistics are tragically clear on just how dangerous moving water can be.

I DO KNOW, she signs back.

I ALSO KNOW YOU ARE VERY BRAVE AND VERY SMART AND SOMETIMES THAT MAKES YOU STUPID. DO NOT TRY ANYTHING RECKLESS. DO NOT TRY ANYTHING HEROIC. NOT EVEN IF YOU NEED TO SAVE AN ALIEN KITTEN OR SOMETHING. STAY. ON. THAT. ROCK. IF YOU TRY ANYTHING BESIDES STAYING ON THAT ROCK AND WAITING FOR US, I WILL KICK YOUR ASS, AND IF YOU ARE THINKING ‘KEYLA ISN’T SERIOUS AND ALSO SHE’S A HELM OFFICER WITH NOODLE ARMS,’ WHEN WE GET BACK TO THE SHIP, I WILL ALSO TELL PHILIPPA, AND SHE WILL ALSO KICK YOUR ASS, AND YOU KNOW SHE CAN DO THAT. SO STAY ON THAT ROCK. OR ELSE.

Michael stares at Keyla for a minute.

GOT IT, she finally signs back.

GOOD, Keyla says, and then she and Sylvia are turning and hurrying back down the riverbank.

Michael takes a deep breath, processing the conversation, from Keyla’s threat to Sylvia’s tacit disclosure of how long Michael could be trapped here to her own flooding sense of relief.

Whatever happens, at least Sylvia and Keyla are uninjured and, as far as is possible after a shuttle crash on an alien planet, safe. A damaged shuttle with no power and a significant amount of lost supplies isn’t _good_ , but it is, after all, far better than being stranded on an alien planet with nothing at all.

Michael settles back on her rock to wait.

 

When Keyla and Sylvia reappear, they are wearing laden packs and carrying several boards.

WE ARE GOING TO SEND YOU THINGS. THEY WILL ALL BE LIGHT SO THEY WON’T KNOCK YOU OFF THE ROCK IF THEY HIT YOU, Keyla signs. DO NOT LEAN TO REACH THEM, OR ELSE. YOUR FIRST PRIORITY IS TO STAY ON THE ROCK. WE HAVE DUPLICATES AND SO WE HAVE ROOM FOR ERROR. EVEN IF WE DIDN’T, DO NOT.

Within minutes, Sylvia has set the boards up into an old-fashioned catapult. She positions a small item on one side, pulls something up on a PADD, and hands Keyla a small object, motioning a specific height. Keyla drops the object from the specified height onto the catapult, and the small item flies up through the air, arcing back downwards so close to Michael that she can catch it overhand without leaning at all. It turns out to be a ration bar.

On a deep and fundamental level, Michael is impressed.

The next package is another ration bar, then a ration bar with a water purification straw taped to it, then another one bundled with an old-fashioned matchbook.

Sylvia’s simulation presumably accounts for the basic physics of the catapult, along with wind resistance and the fundamental shape of the object in question, but it can’t account for the catapult’s rough design or the fact that, even if the math brings it within less than a meter from Michael’s outstretched hand, she is forbidden to reach for it unless it is within her unleaning armspan. Out of twenty-four diminutive packages thrown, fifteen reach her and nine sink in the water.

At the end of it all, Michael has two meals worth of ration bars, a water purification straw, a windbreaker, a bag containing ten pairs of hand warmers of the type meant to be put in boots or mittens, and, most rustically, a small bundle of paper and dry twigs along with the two boxes of matches. While Starfleet shuttles are equipped with larger, more potent, and, more to the point, more technologically advanced portable heaters for just this kind of situation, Michael has to assume that even the smallest of these is too heavy to safely send. Or perhaps they were among the supplies destroyed in the shuttle crash, a thought that makes worry twist inside her for Keyla and Sylvia as she wonders just how many supplies they do and do not have back at the shuttle. At least Keyla having fixed Sylvia’s concussion implies medical equipment.

THANK YOU, Michael signs. THANK YOU.

Keyla is already disassembling the catapult, glancing at the brightly shining sun as it slips inexorably closer to the horizon.

WE’RE GONNA GO GET TO WORK, Sylvia signs. TAKE CARE, OKAY, MICHAEL? WE’RE GONNA GET THE TRANSPORTER FIXED AND EVERYTHING’S GONNA BE FINE.

I WILL, Michael signs back. YOU TAKE CARE TOO.

WE WILL. SEE YOU _SOON_.

Michael tries to smile at her, though she doesn’t know if she can see it. SEE YOU SOON.

 

She pulls on the windbreaker and eats her first meal’s worth of ration bars, then pulls her knees to her chest and sticks her hands under her armpits, trying to conserve as much warmth as she can in her chilly and damp surroundings. Once positioned, she closes her eyes, trying to meditate.

After half an hour of moderately successful meditation, she entertains herself by running through her tasks on the Discovery for the next week, thinking about how she can make them more efficient, more effective, and, for shared tasks, more pleasant for all involved to participate in.

The sun is dipping low towards the horizon now, the surrounding landscape darkening as this planet’s twenty-six hour day nears its end. Unbidden, a few equally dark memories rise in Michael’s mind, nudging at her as the mental and physical strain of perching on the rock begins to wear at the edges of her mind, leaving her tired and vulnerable. She pushes them away.

_Being stuck on a rock in the middle of a river doesn’t mean you get a free pass to torment me. Go away._

She eats half the remaining ration bars, and then, after due consideration, decides that it's time to stick two of the hand warmers into her boots. The night is getting colder as the light fades, and she curls up more tightly, rubbing her arms. With no way of knowing how long it will take Sylvia and Keyla to get the transporter working, she wants to conserve the kindling a little longer and use it only as the temperature continues to drop.

It’s obscurely comforting to think back to Sylvia and Keyla’s sweeping communications from the bank of the river, their personalities and their nervousness and their emotions winging their way towards her along with their words across the cold water. Even now, the memory warms her in a way that has nothing to do with temperature. It isn’t just Michael’s crewmates out there, it’s her _friends_. Physically, she may be alone and isolated, trapped in a dangerous situation on an alien planet far from home. But Michael’s long, numb months surrounded by Federation-uniformed prison guards and then by cold strangers on the Discovery have given her a bone-deep distaste for being surrounded by people who are connected to her only by the mechanical bonds of duty and responsibility. Even here, trapped in very real danger lightyears from her ship and lightyears more from home, the knowledge that the people trying to save her from that danger are bonded to her by something above and beyond rules and regulations makes her feel...what? Not exactly more optimistic; Sylvia’s positive regard for Michael won’t materially help her to fix the transporter. And not exactly happier; this isn’t the kind of situation that is remotely conducive to such an emotion.

But as the river roars around her and she closes her eyes, conjuring up Keyla’s remonstrations and Sylvia’s reassurance, she realizes that they make her feel safe.


	3. Firelight

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> chapter-specific content warnings: food and discussion of lack of food, non-specific discussion of past trauma

“There’s water about fifty meters ahead,” Georgiou reports, flipping the miniaturized tricorder shut. “We’ll fill up the bags again, and take another rest.”

“Sounds good, Captain,” Joann replies. They’ve been hiking through the autumnal woods for more than four hours now, taking a rest break every forty-five minutes, and Joann can feel sweat forming under her collar, despite the nip in the surrounding air, from the continuous exertion. She’s starting to feel the lack of calories, though so far she’s no more than a little lightheaded. They’ve passed several clusters of bushes bearing dark teal fruit, but a tricorder scan revealed it to be mildly toxic, so they walked on.

The sound of water grows louder as they walk forward, and a minute later, the woods open up to reveal a narrow creek splashing sedately through the forest. Joann kneels to refill her bags of water as Georgiou brushes some sticks from a flat rock and perches on it, dropping her pack beside her.

After resealing her bags and placing them back in her own pack, Joann settles on the rock next to her commanding officer, and Georgiou turns to face her, scanning her with the miniature tricorder. “How are you feeling? Report,” she says crisply.

Evidently _Don’t worry, I’m okay_ isn’t the brand of answer she is looking for. “I’ve been feeling just a little lightheaded, but not physically shaky,” she replies, holding out her hand for the tricorder and scanning Georgiou in turn. Georgiou’s readings are also within normal parameters, and Joann flips the tricorder shut, handing it back to her.

Georgiou nods. “All right. Sounds like it’s time to eat the first of our condensed-calorie rations,” she says, pulling out one of the squares.

Joann opens her own and eats it slowly, letting the sweet, fatty composite dissolve on her tongue.

“Two more hours, then we’ll start looking for somewhere to camp for the night,” she says, planning the obvious aloud for the sake of conversation as Georgiou leans back on the rock, stretching her arms and back. “We should look for a clearing on relatively high ground, with enough space to safely light a fire...am I forgetting anything?”

Georgiou shakes her head. “Sounds good, Lieutenant,” she confirms, adding as an afterthought, “and not too near a water source, since water is more likely to be where other life-forms gather.”

“Right.” Joann nods as Georgiou slides off the rock to refill her own water bags. In the last four hours, neither they nor the tricorder have detected any animals larger than an earthworm, but that doesn’t mean they’re not there.

Slinging her pack back on, Georgiou reaches to touch her toes as Joann stretches her arms and then her back.

“Ready?”

“Ready.”

They walk on.

 

Five hours into their hike, as the sun dips toward the horizon and the autumnal landscape begins to dim around them, they come upon a tree whose limbs are heavy with a fruit that somewhat resembles a pear. A scan reveals it to be edible, and when Joann takes a tentative bite of one after polishing it on her shirt, its flesh is pink and watery, and tastes very slightly like cantaloupe.

They sit under the tree, eating as much fruit as they can before attempting to fold the parachutes into proper large carrying packs for more.

“Now this isn’t something I’ve had to practice for years,” Georgiou mutters, working on her parachute with her tongue poking out of the corner of her mouth.

Joann holds up her attempt. “I think I deviated from the way we were actually trained to do it a few folds in, but this looks like it should work?”

Georgiou grins. “I’ll take it.” She squints back at her own fabric. “Show me what to do after this fold?”

 

They build a fire in a small clearing as the planet’s twenty-six hour day nears its close, the temperature dropping sharply as the shadows of the forest around them lengthen and spread across the ground. Joann can see her breath in the cold night air as she unpacks water and fruit, setting it near the fire and refolding her parachute into a blanketing shawl to wrap herself in.

Georgiou adds her own formerly-packed provisions to the pile and comes to sit beside Joann, poking at the fire as the flames crackle and rise from the pine-like alien wood.

“How are you feeling?” she asks, scanning her again with the tricorder.

“Much better thanks to this,” Joann says, taking a bite of fruit. “Though,” she adds with a slight smile, “I might never eat cantaloupe again.”

“Two meals and a snack of composed of nothing but have a way of wearing on one, don’t they?” Georgiou asks, grinning.

Joann laughs, holding her hand out for the tricorder. “And how are you?”

“Doing fine,” Georgiou responds as Joann scans her. “Though I think I might spend the night turning back and forth to keep either side of me from freezing solid. I didn’t anticipate the temperature dropping quite this severely on this region of this world. That’s space exploration for you, I suppose,” she adds drily.

Joann closes the tricorder and hands it back to her commanding officer, then draws her knees to her chest, staring at the fire for several moments. She glances back at Georgiou, huddled in her parachute.

“Is there any reason why you’re not supposed to have two campfires?” she asks curiously. “I mean, is there a safety or logistical reason, or do people just not do it?”

Georgiou thinks for a moment. “You know, I have no idea,” she says thoughtfully. “I’ve definitely used a reflector before; built my fire at the edge of a rise so that more of the heat was reflected back to me, but two fires...I mean, you’d need to keep an eye on them, and not build them too close together, but I can’t actually think of a safety concern that would make it a bad idea.”

They look at each other for a long moment.

Georgiou grins. “I’m game to try it if you are, Lieutenant,” she says, stranding and tying her parachute around her shoulders like a cape as she picks up the branch they used to sweep their first fire pit clean.

A short while later, Joann is staring meditatively into the original, larger fire, feeling significantly less cold as their second small blaze crackles sedately two meters behind it. The cold night air still feels chilly against her hands when she pokes them out of her parachute to put another stick on the fire, but thanks to the two blazing heat sources on either side of her, she is, almost, warm. Almost.

“The first thing I’m going to do when we get back to the ship,” Georgiou says, breaking their comfortable silence, “is take a long, hot shower. And drink hot chocolate. In the shower.”

“That sounds wonderful,” Joann agrees. “And, uh, innovative.”

“Oh, shower beverages are essential to the life of a Starfleet officer,” Georgiou says. “They’ve kept me going for my first two decades in the Fleet, and they’ll keep me going for the next two.” She takes a bite of not-cantaloupe. “What’s the first thing you’re going to do when we get back to the ship, Lieutenant?”

“I’ll--” All Joann can think of, suddenly, is her new lilac dress with its wrap belt, hanging in readiness on the front of her closet door. She swallows, taking a deep breath. “Well, it was going to be Lieutenant Detmer’s and my six-month anniversary this week,” she says, trying to keep her voice light. “We were planning a...well, a date, a nice one, to celebrate. So the very first thing I’ll do is set up our rain date.” She forces a grin. “And then I’ll take a shower.”

Georgiou’s eyes go soft with sympathy in the firelight, watching Joann in silence for several seconds. Joann hopes that she is not going to say that she is sorry, or that this must be hard, or anything else that is probably true but that Joann does not have time for, does not have _room_ for right now. _Right now_ is not for falling apart. _Right now_ is for the mission.

“That sounds like a very good plan,” Georgiou says gently.

“Thank you,” Joann whispers, staring into the fire. She is grateful that Georgiou understands; that she is not trying to untie the bonds of focus and duty that are, right now, very necessarily holding Joann’s emotions together. Bottling things up might be a bad idea for day-to-day life, but at a time like this, there isn’t the space to break down.

Eighteen hours more. Just eighteen hours—the night and tomorrow’s walk—and they will reach the place that the faint tricorder readings are directing them to. Eighteen hours and they will find out if—

But she doesn’t want to think about that.

Joann realizes her hands are clenched around her kneecaps, and loosens them, taking a deep breath.

“You’re doing all the good, Lieutenant Owosekun.” Georgiou’s voice floats over to her, warm and steady. “We’re doing what we need to do, staying safe for them and going to find them. You’re doing all the good.”

Joann nods, holding on to the words like a lifeline, a lifeline pulling her away from her thoughts, away from the fear, back to this fire and her captain and their mission.

“Yes. Yes.” She nods again, taking another breath. “We’re doing what we need to do.”

“Yes,” Georgiou says, smiling encouragingly, and Joann can see the strain behind her own eyes as she smiles.

“Eighteen hours,” Joann says softly. “We just need to keep going.”

“Yes.” Georgiou nods. “Yes.”

For a minute they sit together in a silence that is broken only by the crackling of the fire. Georgiou adds another stick to the blaze, and Joann twists around to feed the smaller fire behind them. “This would have been easier before the war,” she murmurs aloud to herself as she pokes a few more sticks into the cavern of glowing embers at the center of the fire, allowing an edge of bitterness to cut into her voice.

“What do you mean?” Georgiou asks curiously. There is a a note of genuine surprise in her voice, and when Joann turns back around, she is looking at her with an expression of earnest curiosity.

Joann startles slightly. She had forgotten, momentarily, that Georgiou was not on the Discovery during the war, isn’t one of their original crew, has never grappled with...all that.

“I’m sorry, Captain,” she backtracks. “I just meant...it’s a complicated time to be in Starfleet, so that spills over into how one feels about missions sometimes, that’s all. I didn’t mean to complain.”

Georgiou flaps a hand hastily. “In a time and place like this, you certainly have permission to speak freely, Lieutenant. I’m not about to bust you down to ensign for one sentence of less-than-cheerful commentary.” She hesitates. “I’m just...quite interested now, though, Lieutenant, in what you meant. It’s my own...curiosity...concern...though, nothing more. I ask as a colleague, not as a captain; you certainly don’t have to tell me any more,” she adds, gesturing at the glowing fires, “if you’d rather we called it a night.”

Joann swallows. “It’s...I mean, it’s not private; it’s the kind of thing the whole crew has been talking about, since the war. If you’re really curious to hear it…” _If you want to hear it, and think less of me._

“If you want to tell me,” Georgiou says softly.

Joann looks down at her hands, then stares into the fire. “A mission like this…” She stops, ordering her thoughts, then begins again, speaking slowly and quietly as she tries to put the feelings into words. “Serving in Starfleet, following orders, completing missions...there was always so much purpose in it, but now...there’s this voice in the back of my mind, questioning everything. If Keyla…” She swallows, and continues woodenly, “...isn’t...all right...there was a time when I would have thought it was a sacrifice for a purpose. There was a time when it...wouldn’t have been...okay...at all...but still would have...fit into this, this bigger structure of okay-ness, where there was...a purpose and a goal and principles around everything we did, around serving. Now I feel...cut off from all that. I don’t always feel like I’m part of something bigger. I went into the Academy after secondary school,” she says, swallowing. “And then I had my first posting, and after that the Discovery. All my adult life, I’ve been a Starfleet officer. It was what I chose to do; chose to be. Now...sometimes it feels like I’m going through the motions, but the structure in which the motions had meaning is gone.” She gives a small self-conscious laugh. “I’m sorry. I know you’ve never had to worry about this, about having been...complicit in something so unethical.” She swallows, thinking of Qo’noS. “To have almost been complicit in something much worse.” She swallows again. “When I was younger, I always hoped I’d grow up to be someone like you,” she confesses quietly. “Someone who upheld what Starfleet is, no matter what. Now it feels like that possibility isn’t even open to me anymore. And—and I haven’t let that eat me up too much. We’ve all talked about what happened; we’ve all talked about how what we’re going to do now is keep being the best Starfleet officers we can be. Continuing to serve...working with my colleagues...even starting, starting a relationship...I’ve been moving forward. Because I still want to be a Starfleet officer. But at times like this...times when I once would have had faith that it was all for a greater purpose, and now I...don’t...it makes me wonder if I’m even a real Starfleet officer anymore. If I can’t have faith in this organization, should I even be serving at all?”

Georgiou is silent for a long moment, staring out into the darkness.

“Thank you,” she says softly, “for trusting me with that.” She takes a breath. “My kneejerk response might be to remind you that we need officers who are willing to question, who are willing to not have a simple kind of faith in Starfleet, as we rebuild from what we became during the war. But you know that. You’re not talking about ethics and power structures and professional judgment, are you? You’re talking about the personal, about your identity. What it means to be an officer, at a time like this.”

She glances at Joann for confirmation. Joann nods.

Georgiou is silent for another few seconds, a trace of a grim smile flickering over her face. When she speaks again, her voice is less quiet, and slightly rough, a wry humor in it that Joann doesn’t understand. “Then I suppose I must tell you, you’re quite wrong about me. You assume that I’ve never had cause to question what it meant to be a Starfleet officer. But I have.” She gazes into the fire, its flickering light reflecting in her eyes. “When I first joined Starfleet, I was twenty-nine years old. And it was...I thought it was wonderful. A miracle, almost. This organization committed to peaceful exploration. Diplomacy. Soft power. _Peace_.” She shakes her head. “I had made my way through...difficult things, and then all of a sudden I was walking through the clean, bright halls of a Starfleet ship, and I had...I had so much faith, so much hope.” She swallows, pinching her lips together and taking a breath before continuing. “And then...they say it’s about bad apples, but isn’t the expression that a few bad apples spoil the barrel? Well. Starfleet was used to do some terrible things, in the 2230s. And we were complicit. We all were, to one degree or another. And eventually we were able to shut that _bullshit_ down. But afterword, I took a year’s leave. I felt broken. Lost.” She shakes her head. “I was trying to decide whether to go back in or not. I could see that Starfleet was rebuilding; I could see that it was on its way to becoming something better. The problem was me. The problem was, ‘Who am I, now?’” She is still staring into the fire, as though reading her memories of that time from the flames. “Finally I said to someone I knew, ‘I rebuilt my life around what I thought Starfleet was. Now I don’t even know if that version of Starfleet exists. And without Starfleet, what am I?’ And they said to me—“  Georgiou turns to meet Joann’s eyes. “‘Without you, what is Starfleet?’”

Joann feels tears prick her eyes, a lump of emotion growing in her throat.

“So I went back in,” Georgiou says. “I went back in, to be what I believed Starfleet should be. That was my choice, and it has been…” Her voice catches slightly. “An _honor_ to get to watch so many of you, now, in an even harder time, choose the same.” She smiles gently, the intensity in her words softening slightly. “Lieutenant Owosekun, I’m so sorry you’re going through this, at a time like this, on a mission like this. I can’t fix how hard it is to—to know that our loved ones are in danger. But I can tell you that you have no less part in the bigger picture of what Starfleet is for not having absolute faith in Starfleet.” Georgiou stares into the fire again, continuing quietly, “Starfleet… It is an organization, that is all. It is not a religion, and so it cannot take the place of a religion in our lives. It cannot be our family or our faith. Not that that many people find an unquestioned touchstone in faith or family either,” she adds, smiling wryly, “but you see my point, more or less? Starfleet is us. That is all. It is the product of our choice.”

For a moment neither of them speaks, a silence blanketed by the dark quiet of an alien night.

Joann takes a long breath. “To keep serving...to try to do the right thing, out there in the universe…that’s what I want to do.” She swallows. “That’s what I want to choose.”

Georgiou beams at her. “I am sure you will, Lieutenant,” she says, in a voice just slightly roughened with emotion. “I have seen how you already have, and I am sure that you will.”

Joann smiles proudly, ducking her head. “Thank you, Captain.”

As she looks up again, Georgiou looks her right in the eyes, her gaze gentle yet intense. “Thank _you_ , Lieutenant.”

The fire pops behind them, and the intensity of the moment fades as Georgiou leans over to feed another stick to the smaller fire. Joann nudges the larger fire back to life with a new log and a few well-placed pokes and takes a drink from her water bag through her purification straw.

For a few minutes, they sit in comfortable silence. Georgiou twirls a small stick absently through her fingers, the sound forming a comforting rhythm against the crackling of the fire, and Joann can feel her eyelids drooping slightly, the exhaustion of the day settling into her bones. She yawns.

“I’ll take first watch,” Georgiou says.

“Are you sure? I can,” Joann offers.

“Quite sure. This way I get to relish the anticipation of falling asleep in a few hours, while you have nothing to look forward to but the graveyard shift,” Georgiou says cheerfully.

Joann grins. “All right. Thanks, Captain.”

Georgiou makes a sound of acknowledgement. “How is your temperature right now? Since body temperature drops during sleep, we should feed the fires until you’re a little too hot as you drop off.”

“I’m not a little too hot, that’s for sure.” She adds more kindling to the smaller fire on the left while Georgiou puts a new log on the original fire.

“See how that is once you’re all wrapped up,” Georgiou instructs. She moves to sit near Joann’s feet, facing outwards into the night, as Joann lies down between the two fires, cocooning herself in her parachute.

The fire on the right crackles hungrily as it consumes the piney wood. “Yes, I’m getting just a little too hot now,” Joann confirms a few minutes later.

“Perfect,” Georgiou says, glancing over her shoulder at Joann with a pleased smile before turning back around, the gold on her uniform glinting in the firelight as she gazes out into the night like a sentinel.

Joann smiles, closing her eyes. “Good night, Captain.”

“Good night, Lieutenant.”


	4. White Noise

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please see new tags above added for this and future chapters!  
> This chapter also has some food descriptions.

As dusk settles over the surrounding landscape, dimming Michael’s view of her surroundings, the sound of the river continues to pound in her ears, all the louder for the lack of visual distraction. She would never have thought _sound_ could have as much of an effect as this sound does, but it is _wearing_ , a ceaseless, grinding, all-encompassing white noise that pours in through her ears until it is a constant, unwelcome presence in her own mind, sandpapering the edges of her thoughts and staking an unrelenting claim to the periphery of her consciousness.

She is shivering in earnest now, and she carefully removes half of the twigs and scraps of paper from the waterproof bag Sylvia and Keyla packed them in, scooting a few centimeters back to leave as much space as she safely can for her fire. It takes three matches to get a small blaze going, immediately too hot against the front of her body as she curves herself around it. But it is beautifully, genuinely _warm_ , and in the twenty minutes before the fire burns itself out into damp char in the spray of the river, Michael stops shivering almost entirely, her body merely unpleasantly cold rather than freezing.

She drops another two warmers into her boots and a third into her undershirt, pulling her knees to her chest once again and silently counting—first numbers, then the alphabets of many cultures, both frontwards and backwards—until her whole body is shaking with cold yet again and, with freezing, clumsy fingers, she lights the second fire, reserving a few twigs in the bag. She is making full little fires in the first place because, scientifically speaking, it will last longer and be more warming to get a steady flame feeding on a sustaining amount of fuel than it would to burn each stick one by one like a glorified match, but right now she can’t bear the thought of being left with nothing left to burn in the frozen darkness.

She hovers over her fire, leaning as close as she dares and then moving a few centimeters back every few minutes when her face starts to hurt. _It would be just my luck to burn my own eyebrows off._

Her shivering has subsided once again, almost if not completely, but begins to return as the fire dwindles. The cold wraps itself back around her, consuming her like fire consuming wood, and as soon as her fire flickers out, she lights the three twigs one by one with the last of the matches. When they are gone, she pours the last five warmers down her undershirt, curls up as tightly as she can, and waits.

Never mind the noise, it’s the cold that is all-encompassing. Well. The noise is still all-encompassing as well. The cold and the noise, the noise and the cold, filling her mind and her body, the only two things to exist on her tiny island surrounded by pitch black night.

Michael has not shivered this hard in her life, she doesn’t think, nor been this cold. She wonders, uncharitably, what’s taking Sylvia so long. Does she know just how awful this is? Surely, if she did, she would be working faster.

Another possibility, the chance that something has happened to Sylvia and Keyla, floats into her mind, the only thing more chilling than the cold and louder than the water. She pushes it away, thinking of alphabets again.

An uncertain amount of time later, Michael realizes that something about her situation has started to feel better. She has to think for a moment before she realizes that she has stopped shivering. She barely feels cold at all, a realization that fills her tired mind momentarily with relief and then, half a second later, with foreboding.

_That’s not good._

She stops herself from running over a mental checklist of the symptoms and progression of hypothermia. _Just wait and keep yourself as warm and curled up as you can, Burnham. That’s your objective right now._

The constant roaring of the water combined with the complete darkness of the night combines to form a kind of sensory deprivation chamber, locking Michael inside her own mind with nothing but her thoughts for company. Against her will, memories begin to rise inside her again, the sounds of explosions from the brig on the Shenzhou, the look of pain and confusion in Connor’s eyes before he…

_No. Stop. Go away. I don’t want to think about that right now._

She tries to replace the memories with something else, reciting alphabets again, but it is as though the unabating white noise of the river has expanded to take up even more space inside her mind, draining her of anything else she tries to think about in a kind of involuntary meditation. In pitch darkness, the sound of the water roars around her, stifling, muffling, creeping into her mind like the blank static of a lost connection, and it’s hard to feel like there is anything else out there in the universe beyond the smothering all-encompassing darkness and sound. Is anything else really out there, beyond the numbing darkness? Does anything really exist? Does she?

Michael tries to picture the faces of the people she loves, the people she will see again when she gets back to the ship; when she gets back home. But the images feel ephemeral, ripped from her mind by the roaring of the water.

What will make her feel better? What will make her feel like _herself?_

Plans. She needs to make a plan for what she’ll do when she gets back to the ship and sees the people she loves, not just vaguely think about them.

The people she _loves_. The people she’d do anything for. _What could I do to make them most happy?_

Philippa. What is the best thing she could do for Philippa? She considers, briefly, reviving her wire-jewelry hobby from years ago and making Philippa a pair of earrings, maybe in the shape of the Starfleet insignia. _Wait, is it legal to put a Starfleet symbol on something that isn’t a Starfleet uniform?_ She feels like the answer to this question is quite obvious, but her thoughts feel sleepy, fuzzy, and she can’t quite put her finger on it. Well. It wouldn’t have to be a Starfleet insignia. She could coil the wire around and around, making tiny telescopes. _Does Philippa even wear earrings?_ She feels like she knows the answer to this question as well, but can’t summon it up, either. _I could always make her a necklace. A telescope necklace. If I put a little lens in it, it could even function as a real telescope. But...no. Philippa doesn’t have a birthday coming up. I can’t just walk up to her and give her a telescope necklace. What would make her most_ happy?

All at once, the answer surfaces in her mind, warm and perfect. _I’ll go to the gym and spar with her. I’ll let her pick the discipline, whatever she wants, and we’ll spend the whole morning sparring._ Michael can see it now; can see the warm sunlamps of the gym and hear the sound of the treadmills on the other side of the room; can feel the thwack of being smacked to the mat and smell the familiar scents of sweat and chalk. _Yes. I’ll go to the gym with Philippa and spar with her in whatever discipline she wants. That’s my plan._

Sylvia. What would make Sylvia most happy? Nothing to do with training, for her. Nothing to do with Starfleet. Just something...something normal, something hopeful, the kind of thing people do when there isn’t really anything else much going on. _Board games. That’s what we should do. We’ll take an evening where neither of us has a duty shift the next morning, and we’ll hunker down in one of our rooms, with pillows all over the floor and ten kinds of snacks, and we’ll play board games and listen to music. We’ll play all the card games we played as kids, and she can show me that strategy game she plays with Joann and Rhys and Airiam, and I’ll teach her three-dimensional chess. We’ll stay up as late as we want and fall asleep on the floor talking. I’ll make it all as ridiculous and perfect and happy as I can. I’ll synthesize...I’ll synthesize slippers. Fluffy slippers. And we’ll have ridiculously fancy appetizers, mini quiches and vegetables cut into spirals and chocolate eclairs and spanakopita and dates rolled in powdered sugar and strawberries with mascarpone fruit dip and the red bean dumplings with the little flowers on them._

She is so intent on the warmth of her plans that she teeters slightly on the rock, startling herself back to the present. The loud, dark present.

She’s so tired.

 _What if I fall asleep and fall off the rock?_ That’s one problem that does, incredibly, seem to have a workable solution—a workable solution that is appealing, to boot. If she lies down on the rock, wrapping around it, she won’t teeter off of it if she falls asleep.

 _And_ then she can sleep. She can lie down, and she can sleep.

Sleep sounds wonderful.

_No, Burnham, you’re not supposed to sleep. You’re supposed to wait._

But she does need to lie down. So that she doesn’t fall off the rock.

With fumbling, frozen fingers, she peels off the windbreaker and then her uniform jacket, letting them fall away into the water as she lies down, curling herself over the top of the rock. It feels good to lie down, to relax, to rest, and she wonders why she didn’t do this earlier. _Because you were cold,_ she reminds herself. _You wouldn’t have wanted to stop being curled up._

But she isn’t cold now. She is warm, comfortable, snuggling against the rock like she would against I-Chaya’s fur when she was a child, baby Spock curled next to her. Images drift across her mind, Sylvia and Keyla signing to her from the bank of the river, Amanda hugging her goodbye when the Discovery shipped out from Earth, Hugh coming to see Keyla and Michael off before the away mission, telling them all to take care. There’s something bothering her, an icy fear twisting at the back of her mind, even if she can’t remember exactly why she should be so afraid. _What if I don’t see them again?_ But of course she will see them again. She has this rock, this rock as steady and comforting as I-Chaya. She has this rock…

And suddenly she is crying, without tears, and the only thought that will coalesce in her mind is that this rock is not enough. _This rock is not enough. This rock is not enough. Please, Sylvia, get me out of here...please...Sylvia...Philippa...someone…_

_Please get me out of here...I don’t want to be alone anymore…_

The water roars in her ears, the rock and the river and the darkness spinning around her and floating through her mind, and she drifts, alone, in the darkness, until all at once, the tendrils of the transporter are wrapping around her, shimmering with golden light, and--

Silence.

No river. No sound. Just perfect, beautiful silence, broken instants later by footsteps pounding towards her, and then Sylvia is leaning over her, cupping her face in her hands.

“Michael! Michael…”

Michael has to close her eyes because there is a light shining, barely bright enough to illuminate Sylvia’s face but far too bright for her eyes.

“Sit back against the wall,” Keyla’s voice is instructing Sylvia, and then someone’s arms, Keyla’s arms, are wrapping around Michael, gently lifting her upper body from the smoothness of the floor and laying her against Sylvia’s chest. Michael’s cheek rests against Sylvia’s collarbone, and Sylvia wraps her arms around her as she opens her eyes again, blinking.

In the dim overhead light, she watches as Keyla leans over them, covering Michael with blankets that smell like woodsmoke.

“I’m sorry it took us so long, Michael,” says Sylvia, a note of anguish in her words, and the sound of her voice is strange, each syllable crisp and clean in the surrounding silence, like listening to a rainbow of distinct colors after the all-encompassing white noise of the water.

“Don’t apologize,” says Keyla gently, “you’ll freak her out.”

“Right. Everything’s going to be fine,” Sylvia says to Michael, equally gently. “Keyla’s fine, you’re fine, I’m fine, and just wait til you see our awesome camp. We have a fire pit and everything.”

Keyla finishes tucking the blankets around Michael, then stands, darting out the...not so much the door as what Michael realizes suddenly is the gaping side of the shuttle, jaggedly open from stem to stern. There is a portable emergency light clipped to the ceiling over them, the light that initially made Michael shut her eyes, and from outside the shuttle, flickering faintly in the dark air, what must be firelight.

Keyla reappears, holding a cup, and sits next to Michael and Sylvia. “Hot chocolate. Do you think you can drink it?”

Michael’s arms are still cocooned in Sylvia’s arms and the layers of blankets, and Keyla holds the cup to her lips. Michael’s thoughts still feel fuzzy, and she can’t figure out why Keyla is using her serious mission voice to, of all things, try to get Michael to drink hot chocolate, but if Keyla is using her serious mission voice, there must be a reason, so she obediently sips the chocolate. Swallowing feels odd, as though she is drinking something either very hot or very cold but her body can’t figure out which.

Her skin hurts. Everything hurts. There are spots swimming in her field of vision, and she is so confused and so tired.

“That’s wonderful,” Sylvia tells her, encouragingly. “You’re doing wonderful, Michael.”

Michael can’t figure out why Sylvia’s voice is so encouraging, or, underneath, so scared. It’s as though she has a puzzle in front of her but half the pieces are missing, or broken, or underwater. Underwater, like the rushing river.

But she isn’t at the river anymore. She isn’t alone with nothing but the rock underneath her. She is here. Here, with Keyla bouncing in and out of the broken shuttle, scanning Michael with a medical tricorder and covering her with more blankets that are warm and smell like smoke, and with Sylvia’s voice in her ear and her arms wrapped around Michael, holding her as though she will never let her go.


	5. Start Your Day Off Right

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Huge thanks to tincanspaceship for the beta help with the first scene! (how do hands even work)
> 
> This fic is now a little over halfway done, and shaping up to be about 3x longer (and angstier) than anticipated (I say in surprise, as though I am ever able to stick to the word count I anticipated). I have most of it drafted and am hoping to continue to get a new chapter up every few days this week, tentatively finishing with either a long Ch8 or a short Ch8 and Ch9. Thanks to everyone who has read, kudos’d, or commented along the way! <3
> 
> Speaking of which, I know the mid-fic commenting lull is A Thing, and begging for comments always feels weird, but I am yearning to hear what you guys think of this/the last few chapters, so if you have the time, energy and inclination to leave a comment, it will be joyfully appreciated! ;)
> 
> chapter-specific content warnings (in addition to those in the tags): more of Joann and Philippa’s current food shortage in this chapter.
> 
> And finally, AO3 now supports emojis! Woo! (That doesn’t have anything to do with this chapter; this is just the first thing I’ve published on here since I saw the news.) 🚀

“Wake up, Lieutenant Owosekun,” someone says gently, shaking Joann’s shoulder lightly as they continue, with a smile in their voice, “it’s your-turn-to-keep-watch-o’clock.”

Joann blinks awake in darkness, looking up at Captain Georgiou’s face, illuminated faintly by the orange light of the fire. All at once, the events of the day come back to her. _Keyla._

Taking a breath, she forces a smile. “Anything interesting happen on watch, Captain?”

“I am quite pleased to say that I have absolutely nothing to report,” Georgiou says as Joann sits up, rubbing her eyes. “I’ve been enjoying some delicious hot water,” she adds, gesturing to a water bag perched near the fire, “if you would like a nice hot bag of water to start your day off right.”

Joann smiles, kneeing her way forward to settle into Georgiou’s former spot. “I hope my watch will be just as uneventful.”

“Well, if you start getting abducted by aliens,” Georgiou says over her shoulder as they switch places, “give me a shout.”

Joann grins. “Aye, Captain.”

Within minutes, Georgiou is sound asleep between the crackling fires, and Joann is alone with her thoughts. Yawning to herself, she settles in for the long watch, reaching for the hot water bag. She briefly considers adding a few slices of not-cantaloupe to the water, but decides against it. She’ll have to eat more not-cantaloupe for breakfast, and she’s already feeling close to the point where she’d rather never even look at it again in her life.

Outside of the small circle of firelight, the darkness is absolute. Joann tries to let her thoughts wander to pleasant topics without losing focus on her cold, silnnt surroundings. Preliminary scans of this planet revealed no humanoid or otherwise sapient life-forms, and since parachuting down, they haven’t seen any sign of large non-plant life at all, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t out there. What creatures might wander these dark woods around them?

Taking a deep breath, Joann reminds herself that, contrary to the scheming beasts of fairy tales, most life forms do not seek to attack other life forms except for food—and those that do, even the largest and most dangerous, are more likely to hunt the familiar sources of prey in their own ecosystems rather than recklessly and irrationally approach two mysterious visitors and their glowing fire.

Scientifically speaking, if any creatures do appear, they’re more likely to be those that occupy a scavenger niche in their ecosystem—an ecosystem that, Joann reminds herself, has not in fact yet demonstrated any signs of animal life at all—and to be cautiously seeking information on this new glowing phenomenon, more wary, as the cliche goes, of Joann and Captain Georgiou than they are of them.

She has been staring into the darkness for several hours when she hears a faint sound like a cry behind her, but when she snaps her head around, the source of the sound is not an alien creature but rather her captain, rustling back and forth in her parachute blanket.

“No, no…” Georgiou mutters, her voice thick with sleep, turning her head back and forth.

“Captain?” Joann says, kneeing her way to Georgiou’s side. Then, more loudly, “Captain. It’s okay. Wake up.”

Georgiou’s eyes open, taking a moment to focus on Joann’s face. As she does, her tensed features relax in relief.

“Bad dream?” Joann says gently.

Georgiou nods. “Just a dream,” she murmurs, and takes a long breath. “I’m all right.” She looks shaken, depleted, her gaze slipping past Joann to stare at things unseen in the darkness beyond.

“Is there anything I can do to help?” Joann asks.

Georgiou’s eyes refocus on Joann, and she is silent for several seconds. “Touch helps,” she says quietly, snaking her right hand out of her parachute cocoon, “or if you can’t do that, maybe some water.”

Joann is fairly certain Georgiou wants touch and not water, but is trying to give Joann a real choice about it. “I’m more than happy to do that,” she says, taking Georgiou’s right hand in her own, then folding her left hand on top of it, cradling Georgiou’s hand in both of hers.

Georgiou squeezes her hand, taking a deep, shaky breath and closing her eyes. They stay like that for several seconds, Georgiou relaxing her hand until she is holding Joann’s gently. Her fingertips are cool against Joann’s palm, and instinctively, Joann lays her right hand against the top of Georgiou’s and curls their fingers inward together, so that their hands are interlocking like coils with Georgiou’s fingertips in the center of the spiral. She smoothes her left hand around their clasped hands.

They sit quietly for several minutes, Georgiou’s eyes opening periodically to trace Joann’s face and closing again as she lies still, takes even, steadying breaths. The shaken, hollow expression on her face gradually fades until Joann is looking once again at the face of the captain she sees on duty every day, slowly relaxing back into sleep.

Georgiou’s breathing grows deeper and more even as the minutes pass, and Joann is just wondering whether she has dropped off again when her eyes blink open. She gives Joann a small smile--grateful, affectionate, a little sad--and squeezes Joann’s hand before letting go, tucking her hand back into her parachute and closing her eyes.

“Good night, Captain,” Joann says softly. She thinks for a moment, biting her lip, then adds, “I’ll be right here.” Kneeing her way back to the edge of the circle of firelight, she settles back in to keep watch, letting her eyes readjust to the darkness of the forest around them.

When Keyla’s nightmares come, they are quiet, frozen, nothing that would rouse Joann if her girlfriend didn’t nudge her gently awake. They have a routine, now. Joann turns on the light, and Keyla slowly puts that night’s dream into words, narrating tangled and surreal sequences of images of dying friends and white-hot explosions.

Her nightmares have eased over the eight months since the war’s end, arriving every few weeks instead of every few nights, just as the memories that haunt Joann have begun to lose their sharpness with time and telling. Some part of Joann is, she realizes, still waiting all too earnestly for a time when the past leaves them both alone for good.

The ordeal she has just watched her captain endure is a bittersweet reminder that, no matter how well overcome, some parts of the past can never be laid entirely to rest. Wrapping her arms around her knees, Joann stares into the darkness, thinking about war and pain and the lifespan of memory.

 

Dawn approaches slowly, the inky darkness of their surroundings turning to deep greys from which the colors of the forest gradually emerge, painted with pale purple light. The underbrush around the clearing occasionally rustles very softly, and Joann smiles at the quiet sound of life stirring and bustling all around them. The mammalian life forms in this environment must be crepuscular, venturing out for food and socialization at this particular time of day, which would explain why their perfunctory scans during daylight hours didn’t detect this thriving alien community.

While she is still grateful for the warmth of the glowing embers of the quietly burning fires, the morning air is beginning to feel a little less frozen against Joann’s exposed face. It’s almost light enough to travel, and Joann decides that she’ll wait another thirty minutes for the light to grow and the cold to lose a bit more of its bite before waking Georgiou to start the second and final leg of their journey.

Feeding another stick to the fire, she turns to look at her captain. Georgiou’s features are slack with deep sleep, her breathing slow and even. Joann is happy to see her getting such sound sleep after her interrupted night. The emotions she felt as she held her captain’s hand in the early hours of morning stir inside her once again as she looks at her captain’s face, relaxed and vulnerable in sleep. A terrible sadness for the pain she has witnessed mixes with a fierce stab of protectiveness, along with a kind of quiet, grateful admiration.

Joann did not expect, when she asked her captain if there was anything she could do to help, to have Georgiou take her up on her offer. It is a rare Starfleet commanding officer--a rare Starfleet servicemember, of any rank--who will not only encourage their friends or subordinates to reach out for support, but dare to do the same themselves. Joann is surprised at just how comforted she feels by what Georgiou has done, a silent sense of shame she didn’t even realize she was  carrying about her own quiet efforts to reach out to others for support melting a little further away.

As the light of the rising sun begins to appear through the trees, Joann sets another bag of water to heat by the fire and places a few of their remaining fruits in a perfect row in front of it, listening to the fading bustle of the diminutive woodland creatures around them for a few more minutes before making her way to Georgiou’s side.

“Good morning, Captain,” she says, shaking her shoulder gently.

“Mmmph,” Georgiou mutters, opening her eyes. She blinks a few times, her sleepy eyes focusing on Joann’s face and the forest behind her, and Joann can see the moment when the memories of the preceding day and night come back into her eyes.

She takes a quiet breath, then smiles at Joann. “What’s our status, Lieutenant?”

“Nothing too exciting, Captain. There does seem to be a thriving community of small crepuscular mammals around, which explains why we didn’t see any signs of them yesterday, so we have some company--or, at least, we did before they started heading back to bed. For those of us who aren’t so lucky, we have a charming breakfast buffet to begin our day,” Joann says, gesturing grandly at the line of fruit.

Georgiou grins sleepily. Sitting up, she pulls out her ponytail tie, raking her fingers through her messy hair. “And a very charming one, at that.”

Joann grabs one of the pieces of lightly-warmed fruit, polishing it on her jacket before biting into it. “Presentation is everything.”

Georgiou reaches for a piece of fruit as she finishes tying back her hair. “Who says two Starfleet officers on stranded on an alien planet can’t have a five-star experience?”

“Who indeed.”

“Our buffet remains unfortunately lacking in calorie density,” Georgiou adds, scowling slightly at the piece of fruit in her hand as though taking its species to task for insufficiently nourishing the alien visitors to its planet. “Can you set the tricorders to constantly scan for edible plant life, Lieutenant? Given the length of our remaining journey, it will be worthwhile even to step a bit out of our way for food.”

“Yes, Captain,” Joann says, flipping her tricorder open and adjusting its scan settings. “If we don’t find another creek within a few hours, I’ll set it to scan for water as well,” she adds, “but the landscape seems to be pretty well covered with them for the time being.”

Georgiou nods. “Sounds good, Lieutenant.” She pulls out her own tricorder and punches a few buttons, gazing pensively in the direction of the readings. “Since we were able to make it almost exactly halfway before we stopped for the night, we only have another thirty kilometers left to walk. Six hours’ walk with an hour and a half for rest breaks and gathering food….if all goes well, we should arrive at our destination a few hours after midday. Plenty of light.”

It’s a small benefit in what may be a large crisis. Joann nods. “Yes, Captain.”

Georgiou begins to fold her parachute back into a pack, smaller now with only a few pieces of fruit remaining. Joann pours some of her remaining water over the dying fires, closing her eyes and scrunching up her face as warm steam hits it.

Georgiou chuckles. “Not enjoying the away mission sauna experience, Lieutenant?”

Joann opens one eye to give her a look. “Not enough heated towels.”

“A fair complaint. Make sure you note it when reviewing this planet’s amenities.” Georgiou stands, using the stick they used to dig the fire pit to begin burying the soggy ashes. “Now, if you want a mud mask,” she adds, turning over the damp soil, “I might be able to help you out.”

Joann grabs another stick, standing to help her. “I think I’ll pass on the offer. After all, we wouldn’t want to break the prime directive by giving those crepuscular critters any new skincare ideas.”

Georgiou bursts out laughing, bending over with her hands on her knees, and Joann smirks in triumph as they finish their task in companionable silence.

As she pushes the last pile of dirt over the charred wood, she hears Georgiou snort with laughter one more time, and she grins to herself.

Laying down her stick and picking up her pack, she surveys the campsite. “All right, I think that’s the wrap on this campsite, as far as safe camping protocols go.”

“Looks good,” Georgiou confirms, slinging her own pack over her shoulder. “Ready for another day of boldly exploring an alien world, Lieutenant Owosekun?” she asks brightly, her mouth twisted with a grim amusement that counterbalances the dark smudges beneath her eyes.

“Aye, Captain,” Joann confirms with a wry grin.

Georgiou steps forward into the forest, and, with one last look back at their former campsite, Joann walks after her.

 

While another creek does indeed provide the opportunity to refill the water bags, they do not find another source of food, and as the sun rises higher in the sky, the hillier terrain they encounter leaves Joann feeling the lack of fuel sooner than she had hoped. She eats her last two pieces of fruit three hours into the journey, a painful decision made for fear that if she doesn’t, her shaky legs will tip her over.

Georgiou eats the last of her own fruit and half of her one remaining emergency ration at the next rest break, frowning at the tricorder as she scans Joann. “Nothing outside what I would expect,” she says, her tone reassuring and gently upbeat, “but your body does not seem to be appreciating the lack of calories. How do you feel?”

“A little lightheaded,” Joann admits.

“Enough that you might pass out?”

“I don’t think so.” Admittedly, having never passed out before, she isn’t exactly sure how to tell.

Georgiou closes the tricorder with a click. “Say something if you need a rest break,” she tells her seriously. “At any point. We must keep going, but we must do so carefully.”

Joann nods. “Yes, Captain.”

“First priority once we reach the readings will be to fan out, search for food.”

Joann nods.

“In the meantime, let’s hope we find another of those trees.” Georgiou smiles slightly. “I never thought I would miss that taste of nearly-cantaloupe.”

“And I never thought I’d miss arguing with the mess hall synthesizer,” Joann says drily. “Or arguing with any of the ship’s systems, for that matter.”

Georgiou laughs, a genuine expression of amusement that, for a moment, melts some of the tensions from her eyes. “You Ops officers. Always slap-slap-kiss with your precious systems.”

“It wouldn’t be slap-slap-kiss if they weren’t so predictably contrary,” Joann defends herself, grinning.

“What is the old Earth expression? It takes two to tangle?”

“Well, wouldn’t we anger our systems less if our commanding officers weren’t insisting on miracles?”

“Now you sound like an engineer, Lieutenant.”

“I must have eaten lunch with Sylvia a few too many times this week,” Joann says, and sees the pain that springs into Georgiou’s eyes at the same time as fear twists her own stomach at the reminder of Sylvia.

They are quiet for a moment, then Georgiou takes a breath, looking Joann in the eye before rising to her feet. “We’ll find them soon, Lieutenant,” she says gently. “They are strong and they are capable and we will find them soon.”

 

As the day wears on, they make their way over increasingly rocky terrain, sometimes using their hands for purchase on the steeper ascents. Joann’s thoughts feel distant and floating, and she tries to focus only on the blue of Georgiou’s uniform in front of her as she leads them over hills and around boulders. On all sides, brown, orange, red, gold, green, grey, and then, in front of her, Starfleet blue.

She doesn’t want to think about how much longer the rough terrain is making their thirty-kilometer journey. _What if Keyla is injured and she’s barely hanging on and--_

_Don’t think about that._

Taking a deep breath, Joann focuses on the question that has been lingering at the back of her mind since they crash-landed on this planet. Is the foliage red, orange and gold because this hemisphere of this planet is in the midst of a season comparable to autumn in Earth’s temperate regions, or because that is the natural color of the plants in this ecosystem?

She will likely be able to figure it out with a few tricorder scans, and if she can’t, Sylvia-- _oh, Sylvia, please be safe_ \--will certainly be able to, but scientific observation hasn’t exactly been at the top of her priority list thus far, and she contents herself with wondering.

Is the cold, crisp air an indication of the season, or just another coincidental similarity to Earth that has started Joann making assumptions in a kind of climate counterpart to anthropomorphism?

They approach another long, steep rise, and Joann’s focus is consumed by picking her way over the rocky ground between brambles and old-growth trees. A soft, fuzzy darkness has begun to encroach at the edges of her vision every few minutes, dispersing when she shakes her head and takes a deep breath, only to return a few minutes later, lapping at the edges of her consciousness. _Is there a word for when you’re doing something like anthropomorphism, except rather than projecting humanoid qualities onto other life-forms, you’re projecting the characteristics of your own home planet or solar system or galaxy onto another?_ If there is, Commander Burnham probably knows it. _Please be okay, Michael._

The ground levels out slightly as they approach the bottom of the rise, and Joann walks on, blinking away the darkness in her peripheral vision. The sun is high in the azure sky, shedding warm light over the landscape, and she reflects distantly that even this rougher terrain has a beauty to it--admittedly a beauty that she could appreciate more if it wasn’t an impediment to reaching the point the readings are coming from. _The readings._ They’re so close now, just a few more hours to go.

She keeps placing one foot in front of the other, dreamlike, as she follows the blue of Georgiou’s uniform. _Just a few more hours to go..._

Her senses fade away and her thoughts dull and cut out as the soft darkness wraps around her.

 

Joann blinks awake. Was she unconscious? She doesn’t remember stumbling, or falling, or certainly not hitting the ground, but she is definitely waking from an undetermined amount of time of fuzzy nothingness. She stares blearily at the forest around her, feeling sticks and rocks poking into her legs, warmth against her side. She is sitting on the ground leaning against Captain Georgiou’s shoulder, her commanding officer’s arm wrapped around her.

“There you are,” Georgiou says gently. Blinking away the last of the fuzziness, Joann peels away from her side slightly, sitting up under her own power.

Georgiou picks up her tricorder from where it is laying in her lap, scanning her. “What do you feel like? Report.”

Joann closes her eyes, taking inventory of her body. “Nothing hurts. Except for a bit of a headache.” She rubs her eyes. “And I feel pretty lightheaded. But I guess that’s obvious. I passed out?”

“For a few minutes.” Georgiou flips the tricorder closed again. “According to this, your body is simply quite badly out of fuel.”

Joann nods.

“Let’s take another few minutes to rest, and we’ll get back on the road again,” Georgiou says gently.

“Sounds good, Captain,” Joann says. She can see in the pain in Georgiou’s eyes the words that go unspoken: that if this were not a crisis, that if they did not above all need to find crewmates who might be in far more dire danger than they are, Georgiou would not be putting them back on the road.

But it is a crisis, and so they do get back up, making their way across hills and over streams, Joann placing one foot in front of the other as her vision swims and her thoughts drift, the blue of Georgiou’s uniform now at her side rather than in front of her, her commanding officer’s hand beneath her arm a light and constant pressure through it all.


	6. The Most Human Human

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Now that I have most of the rest of the fic drafted, I fiddled with the relationship tags; though they did cuddle for eight hours, Sylvia and Michael don’t have that many one-on-one interactions to speak of in the remaining chapters, so in the interest of truth in labeling, I replaced the Michael & Sylvia tag with Keyla & Michael. I also bumped the rating to T, not for any specific reason but just because it generally ended up a little dark to really be G. 
> 
> And finally, now that the story as drafted has ballooned into 4x the length I originally planned, I added some more content tags--the one relevant to this chapter is ‘discussion of Michael’s time in prison.’
> 
> The competition Keyla talks about in this chapter is a real thing (though she may be garbling some of the details thanks to the passing centuries; I wrote what I remembered and only then actually looked it up again, for the sake of ‘authenticity.’ ;) I only know about it thanks to a book about it also called ‘The Most Human Human’ (which I have not read in full myself), if you’re interested in reading more!
> 
> Speaking of books I haven't actually read yet myself, Philippa being a former field medic comes from the prequel novel 'Drastic Measures.'
> 
> I didn't have time to edit this my usual 47382 times, so apologies for any incoherent sentences and typos! <3

Dawn light filters through the jagged hole in the side of the shuttle as Keyla nibbles her ration bar and gazes up at the sky, Michael curled sound asleep in the nest of blankets beside her. After spending the night holding Michael, Sylvia is outside repairing the synthesizer and keeping an eye on the fire, and Keyla has stopped her own rounds and stationed herself beside Michael accordingly. She does have a tricorder alarm set to go off if Michael’s vital signs start to change, but keeping a human eye on the colleague who nearly died a few hours before feels like a fairly important precaution.

It took an hour and a half for Michael’s temperature to return to normal and her vital signs to stabilize, and they kept her awake, talking to her, for another hour, until Keyla decided that she was far enough out of danger that they were really only doing it for their own nerves, and told her she could sleep. Through the small hours of the morning, Sylvia held Michael and Keyla darted around the camp, feeding the fire, scanning Michael, and keeping an eye on the dark woods around them.

Finally, Sylvia began nodding so much that Keyla told her that she might as well catch a few hours of sleep herself before she had to extricate herself from Michael and get to work on the broken synthesizer. With Sylvia asleep, Keyla kept an even closer eye on Michael, sitting beside her sleeping colleagues as much as she could. Now, stationed permanently at Michael’s side, she leans sleepily back against the wall, wrapped in a blanket of her own, finishing her ration bar and listening to the faint sounds of Sylvia’s equipment clicking and thunking and Sylvia swearing under her breath, underlayed by the distant noise of the river.

Michael looks younger in sleep, curled lightly on her side in the blankets, shadows under her eyes and her lips downturned as though in concentration. Keyla doesn’t think she will ever be able to get enough of the sight of her, safe and alive and well. Well, not for a good while, anyway.

In the dim light of the crashed shuttle, Keyla realizes that she is trembling lightly, and not from cold. After all those hours, Michael out there being misted with water in subfreezing temperatures...in her heart of hearts, even as she laid out the shuttle’s medkit and heated water and blankets, Keyla began to fear they were fixing the transporter to recover Michael’s body, not to save her. As Sylvia worked on the transporter, utterly focused on the task at hand, and Keyla soldered wires and prepared nutrient-laced hot chocolate, the thing she feared the most was Sylvia’s reaction if they beamed back Michael...not alive. Would she scream and fall apart, would she go quiet and numb, would she blame Keyla or herself or the universe? Somehow Keyla already knew _she_ would be numb, that she would...deal with it...later, as she always did, as she always does, but Sylvia…

She didn’t want to see the expression in Sylvia’s eyes. Somehow, that was the one thing that cut through her careful, focused professionalism. She didn’t want to watch Sylvia’s eyes when she saw her. The terror of losing Michael _\--her_ Michael; her crewmate; through and despite everything, _hers--_ had been clawing at her own heart for hours, and she had been pushing it aside for hours, and she knew that whatever happened, for the duration of the mission she could push it away still. But having to witness Sylvia…

But, of course, she didn’t have to. Michael materialized alive and blinking on the shuttle floor, and Keyla fell into the rhythm of her planned first aid, going through the steps of caring for a hypothermia patient as Sylvia held Michael, talking to her.

Now, sitting on the shuttle floor, watching over Michael as she sleeps, safe and out of danger, all Keyla has to deal with is the terror of what actually happened and, oh, god, it doesn’t ever get easier carrying a medical crisis, does it, at least not for Keyla. She shivers at the memory of lifting Michael’s freezing, floppy body into Sylvia’s arms, Michael’s glazed eyes barely tracking Keyla’s movements as she wrapped her in blankets. There’s something particularly haunting about the memory of Michael’s bare arms; Keyla has heard of the paradoxical undressing brought on by hypothermia, but seeing one of the smartest, strongest Starfleet officers she knows put herself in deeper danger with her own two hands drives that knowledge home in another way entirely.

Keyla finishes her ration bar and pulls her knees to her chest, wrapping her arms around them. _It’s okay,_ she reminds herself, resting her cheek on her knees to watch Michael. _She’s safe now. It’s okay._

_Oh, god..._

She has never wished so much that Captain Georgiou was here. Well, technically, that probably isn’t true; she spent months of war wishing every day that Philippa was back with them, until she finally, miraculously was. But in this moment, it certainly _feels_ like she has never wished so much that Philippa Georgiou--former field medic, decorated captain, calm and confident and brave in any possible emergency situation--was here. Here to…to...not so much to handle things on a practical level; Keyla is pretty confident that she is actually doing just fine. To...to _handle_ things. To have everything under control.

Keyla thinks she did do a pretty competent job treating Michael--preparing the supplies she would need beforehand for whatever state Michael arrived in, assessing her condition and immediately getting her core temperature up with Sylvia’s body heat and the fire-warmed blankets and the warm nutrient-laced hot chocolate before running additional scans, medicating her, and peeling off her boots to wrap her thankfully not-frostbitten feet in the blankets. Yes. Keyla has Starfleet emergency medical training, and she used that training, and she doesn’t think there is anything a trained medic would have done substantially faster or better or differently. But--

It’s the emotional handling of the situation that she is sure Philippa would be dealing with better, not the logistical handling of it. And that’s not entirely separate, is it? Philippa would just be calmly _handling_ it all, rather than pushing herself to the max just to get through the initial emergency, and then shaking and waning afterword.

Keyla sighs.

It isn’t that she thinks she’s a bad or incompetent officer for not being to slide comfortably into a medical role. Everyone in Starfleet has their strengths and their assigned role, and as long as they can perform other roles when needed in an emergency _\--and I can,_ Keyla reminds herself; _I’ve always handled medical emergencies competently enough, including this one_ \--it’s okay not to be the best of the best at everything. The best, maybe--it is Starfleet, and the requirement of well-roundedness is par for the course--but not the best of the best. It’s okay.

 _It’s okay,_ she tells herself. _It’s okay._

Keyla did okay. Michael is okay.

Damn it, is Keyla ever ready for this whole situation to be safely over.

She closes her eyes for a moment, visualizing it. Michael back in a real sickbay, the synthesizer working and Sylvia getting some real sleep, and Joann--

But she doesn’t want to think about that.

Beside her, Michael stirs, stretching her arms, and her eyes blink open, focusing on Keyla.

“Good morning,” Keyla says. “How do you feel?”

Michael’s eyes go distant for a moment, and Keyla senses that she is running over her memories of the night before. “Good,” she says. “Fine, I mean, I think I’m fine.” She stretches cautiously, rolling her neck from side to side. “My body...aches a little, all over. Like it does when you’re so tired that it hurts.” She blinks sleepily. “And I _am_ tired.”

“It makes sense that you’re tired. Getting really hurt is really draining on the body,” Keyla reminds her gently. “I can give you an anti-inflammatory for the achiness. Where is it on the pain scale?”

“Just a one or a one and a half. It’s just...achy; it’s not too bad.”

Keyla reaches for the medkit, loading a low dose and pressing the hypo to Michael’s neck. “There you go. Anything else I should know about?”

Michael shakes her head. “I guess if I’d lost any toes, you would have told me about it,” she says, her quiet, tired voice shot through with humor.

Keyla smiles. “You are entirely intact. And your readings are excellent; you just need to take your time and rest today.”

“Thank you, Keyla.” Michael peers around sleepily. “Where’s Sylvia?”

“She’s outside, working on repairing our synthesizer.”

Michael frowns. “Wasn’t she up all night with me? I remember her holding me…”

“She got some sleep, too, after you were asleep,” Keyla tells her gently. Michael looks a bit doubtful about this, evidently doing the math and wondering whether a few hours’ sleep is enough for Sylvia, and Keyla quickly changes the subject before she can inquire further. “When you’ve rested a bit more, you’ll have to come see our campsite. We’ve had a lovely fire going all night, and we can have tea later,” she says, trying to keep her tone upbeat and encouraging. There is a reason Sylvia went straight from caring for Michael to working on the synthesizer, but Keyla isn’t ready to tell her that reason. She wants to give her another few hours to recuperate first.

And if she’s also dreading being the one to explain--well, giving Michael time to rest a bit first really is a good idea, medically and psychologically speaking, so there’s no particular need to take herself to task over any other elements of that decision.

Michael smiles. “I’m sure it’s lovely. I remember seeing it flickering, last night, from outside the shuttle. And...the blankets you wrapped me in, you heated them by the fire, didn’t you? I was...not really feeling the temperatures of things normally, but I remember that they smelled like woodsmoke.”

“Yes.” Keyla nods. “I wasn’t sure how much you’d remember.”

“I was pretty out of it, wasn’t I?” Michael recalls, smiling slightly.

“Understandably so,” Keyla tells her, smiling back. Michael’s eyelids are drooping, and she adds, “You can get some more rest now, Michael. We’ve got everything under control.”

Michael nods sleepily. “I’m sure you do. You fixed the transporter. Built the camp.” Her eyes flutter open. “You rescued me.”

Keyla feels a lump in her throat. “Sylvia did most of the tech work.”

“You’re a team. Fixed the transporter. Took care of me,” Michael whispers. “You saved me.”

Keyla feels her heart contract at the gratitude on Michael’s face, and as her eyes flutter closed again, she murmurs, “Of course we did.”

 

The next time Michael stirs, Keyla helps her sit up, handing her another cup of nutrient chocolate. They chat for a few minutes about the away team’s status, Keyla updating Michael on the supplies remaining to them after the shuttle crash--no backup power cells; no way to power any heavy equipment save the one flash of energy Sylvia was able to conjure up for Michael’s rescue.

“And Sylvia is still working on the synthesizer?” Michael asks, frowning.

Keyla nods. “Michael?”

Michael looks at her. “Uh-huh?”

“I have to tell you something, and I want you to remember that it’s not as bad as it sounds at first,” she says quietly.

Michael goes still, watching her. She dips her head in a brief nod, waiting.

“We think it’s possible that Joann and Captain Georgiou are in trouble,” Keyla says. Now comes the hard part. Michael is her commanding officer, and, while not on duty, she is no longer incapacitated; Keyla has to tell her the unsoftened truth. She forces herself to continue, reciting the words mechanically. “We sent that automated SOS when we started going down, and a little while after Sylvia and I washed up to this position in the shuttle, we heard and saw evidence of an explosion in the lower atmosphere, between fifty and a hundred kilometers northwest of our position. At that distance, we could get almost no readings or details. All we had was our eyes and ears. It could have been a great many things beside their shuttle, and we have no evidence to suggest it was. But we are working under the assumption that they are on this planet and need our help.”

Michael’s eyes have gone glassy with shock and pain, and when she opens her mouth, the only sound she makes is one that Keyla does not have words to describe, somewhere between a moan and a cry.

Woodenly, Keyla plunges onward. “Sylvia is fixing the synthesizer so that one or two of us will be able to hike towards the location with food and medical supplies, and another can stay here using the synthesizer to create the parts to try to rig up a long-range scanner and transporter--the ideal, but if it’s even possible, it will take days.” The task of the telling finally over, she takes a shaky breath, sliding back into medic mode. Her duty just now was one that required her to hurt Michael, but now her duty is once again to help heal her.

She pulls the blankets at Michael’s waist back up to her shoulders, covering her with their warm weight and telling her loudly but gently,  “We don’t know if it was their shuttle, and even if it was, Philippa and Joann are resourceful and resilient. Our ass-kicking field medic captain and our tech-genius ops officer. They are brilliant Starfleet officers, and tough, strong people, and they know what they’re doing. We just need to do the best we can to get ready to look for them, but they are incredibly resourceful and resilient, and wherever they are right now, there’s no doubt in my mind they’re kicking ass.”

Michael is still blankly staring at her, her face twisted with pain. Slowly, she nods, the glassiness in her eyes fading slightly, then closes her eyes, taking a few even, steadying breaths. The pinched line on her forehead gradually smooths, and when she opens her eyes, they are clear again, and focused only on Keyla, gentle with sympathy. “This must be hard for you,” she says softly.

Keyla swallows, feeling some of her own frozen pain melting back into her. “Yeah.”

“What you said is true. They’re resourceful and resilient. Even if that explosion was their shuttle, they’re probably going to be just fine.”

“Yeah.” Keyla can feel her eyes fill with tears at the gentleness of Michael’s reassurance. She takes a deep breath. “They will. And we’re going to do everything we can to prepare to see them again. Which is why Sylvia is fixing the synthesizer. And why you need to rest. Either we’ll need to have one of us stay here to watch the camp while two of us hike in the direction of the explosion to scan, or two of us will stay here and one of us will go. Probably the former. And to do that safely, we need a synthesizer, and you need to heal up.”

It is a mark of Michael’s exhaustion that she merely nods, her eyelids drooping again, despite all the fear and purpose Keyla knows she must feel.

“Get some rest, Michael,” she says gently, scanning her again as she sinks back into her nest of blankets, her breathing already growing deep and even with sleep.

 

She wakes again at midmorning, and Keyla gives her a full checkup, helping her stand and then lowering her back to the floor. “You’re doing just great, Michael. In a few hours, let’s try to move you out to the campsite. Sylvia’s napping now, but she’ll be up and back to working on the synthesizer by then. We’ll make you another blanket nest, and we can all hang out together.” She smiles. “In the meantime, you’re stuck in here with me. I’m sorry I can’t even offer you a PADD to read.”

Michael smiles slightly. “Not sure I could focus on it anyway.”

Keyla nods in understanding, trying to think of a topic of conversation so that they’re not just staring at each other, but Michael beats her to it.

“Keyla?”

“Yeah?”

“I wanted to thank you.” Michael’s big dark eyes meet Keyla’s with soft earnestness. “For what you said to me at the river.”

“Oh.” Keyla laughs a little. “Right.”

“It was…” Michael’s fingers twist the blankets in her lap. “It meant a lot to me. To have a reminder that you...That there was something beyond colleagues following Starfleet protocol, out there, trying to help me. That you were helping me as a person, as a fr--a person you knew and cared about, not just doing what you were supposed to do.”

Keyla looks at her in surprise. She wouldn’t have thought of Michael--who, frankly, tends to stick quite closely to protocol, aside from the very notable times when she doesn’t--as the kind of person who would be touched by such a thing. “Of course,” she manages, gratified, and finds herself adding despite herself, “That’s...always been an important part of it all, to me. Being a person, being a human being and a friend, above all. Just like everything else after the war, it can feel a bit of a mess now,” she admits, then tries to think of a way to bring this last admission back around to a pat ending. “But I try,” she finishes with a smile.

Michael, however, is looking at Keyla with genuine curiosity. “A mess?” she asks. “What do you--I, I mean, you don’t have to tell me,” she adds quickly, lowering her eyes.

“No, no, it’s fine. I mean...as good a topic as anything to distract ourselves, this damn messed-up organization, right? If you do want to talk about it,” Keyla says.

Michael nods, her eyes gentle with concerned interest, settling back against the wall and tilting her head to listen.

Well, this is as distracting a topic of conversation as any. Keyla swallows.

“I...like I said, I think a lot of the...the things that we used to define ourselves by, the ways we used to make sense of the universe, got changed by the war. And for those of us in Starfleet...that’s different now, too. Like, I talk about it with my—with Joann, talk about what’s keeping us in Starfleet now, why we joined, how we conceptualize serving. For Joann, Starfleet principles, enmeshing herself in a functional system...that fuels her. And what she’s grappling with after the war is whether she can, you know, believe in it the same way now that it’s barely beginning to be a functional system again.” She sighs softly. “But for me, what I always leaned on was this idea that we had to be _people_ before we were Starfleet officers. Danby and Captain Georgiou and _you_ , Michael, joking around on the bridge of the Shenzhou...that’s what Starfleet was _about_ to me, people being people before they were Starfleet officers. Or, no, maybe not _before_ ; it isn’t like I didn’t believe in Starfleet itself. But...people being good Starfleet officers _because_ they were people. _Through_ being people.” She sighs again, staring past the jagged edges of the shuttle plating and into the forest around them.

Michael looks at her with soft eyes, a small smile at the corner of her lips. “That sounds like a good way to conceptualize being a servicemember.”

Her tone, approving and curious, holds an implicit, gentle encouragement to continue. Keyla does so. “So that was what I leaned on. Before the war, during the war, now.” She nods in the direction of the river, making Michael chuckle slightly.

“But now things are…” She stops and then starts again. “But now, I keep wondering…” She stops again, closing her eyes. How does she explain this? How does she even begin…

Michael is still watching her, gentle curiosity on her face. Keyla thinks for a minute, closing her eyes for several seconds before she opens them again, remembering something.

“I keep thinking of this...this story. Or, not just a story, a true story, a history story.”

Michael’s eyes light up, and Keyla remembers that her training is in xenoanthropology. She grins, and begins. “Centuries ago, when AI was first getting off the ground, there was a yearly competition where the judges would message with robots that had been engineered to interact in as human a way as possible, and also with some volunteer humans, then decide each time whether they thought they had been talking to a robot or a human. Based around Alan Turing’s whole idea of the imitation game--that the question of whether machines could think could be replaced by the question of whether they could, well, beat a human in a contest like this one. Which _was_ then turned into an actual contest, once AI was advanced enough, because humans are like that. And so they ran this contest, and the robot that fooled the most judges into thinking it was a human would win an award for being ‘the most human robot.’

“But the thing is, the nature of this competition, with robots that had been engineered to interact in as natural a way as possible and humans trying to flag them, meant that some of the human volunteers would also be flagged as robots, right? So, an informal award category was added, for ‘the most human human.’ The human being who walked away with the least number of judges thinking they might have been a robot.”

Michael laughs aloud.

“And so, of course, they’d accidentally touched on this whole philosophical question--what makes humans human? Or, to extend that into the interspecies present, what makes people people?”

Humans have an interstellar bad rap for still using the word ‘humanity’ as their word for ‘decency, morality, sapiency, personhood,’ despite the availability of a few created terms in Federation Standard meant to echo the same concept in a more universal way, but they haven’t really caught on. For the purposes of this conversation, however, Keyla fortunately doesn’t really have to worry about it. She isn’t talking about the more layered concept of ‘humanity,’ with its many meanings from the moral to the identifying, but rather about personhood; what it is to be _a person_ , as opposed to _not a person_.

“And the humans, the people, were supposed to try to act as much like people as possible, given that the robots were supposed to be acting as much like people as possible, for the sake of how the competition was run and then also, I guess, for the fun bonus of potentially winning ‘most human human’ if you were flagged as human by enough judges. So they’d try different ways of seeming as human as possible--I don’t remember what they all were, I didn’t read up on the whole thing that closely, but I’d guess, like, spelling errors, and saying ridiculous things, and using a bunch of colloquialisms, and stuff.

“The one I do remember being mentioned, which seemed pretty funny-- _was_ pretty funny--was that one year, the guy who won ‘most human human’ did so by being super rude, insulting the judges and so on.”

Michael grins, and Keyla laughs.

“So it always seemed like this funny story, right? And I’d just think about it occasionally over the years, like, oh, that’s funny. That one of the things that makes humans humans is our capacity to be rude jackasses. And...joking around, insulting or threatening people as a joke--” She grins slightly, tipping her head toward the river again. “It always felt to me like part of being a person. And back in the Shenzhou days, everyone joking around and teasing each other on the bridge, it was just like, okay, stupid humor and saying what we really think and bending Starfleet protocol just slightly--that makes us whole people, and being whole people makes us good Starfleet officers.

“So the my ideas about what being a person meant and what being Starfleet meant, it all fit together. It all worked, without me ever really having to question it at all.” She bites her lip, her momentary amusement at the memories of those days fading. “But the thing is, that guy who proved how ‘human’ he was by being rude to everyone, now he reminds me of…” She lets the words trail off.

Michael’s eyes widen in understanding. “Ah.”

Keyla sighs, slowly turning the medical tricorder over and over in her hands. “Like, I feel like that’s how he operated, in a way. He was...he portrayed himself as...as being _human_ , being _extra_ human. The person who was willing to say what no one else would say; the individual who dared to defy the stuffy Starfleet system. Like, that was how he...portrayed things. Starfleet was the system, and that made Starfleet conformist and useless while _he_ was bold and decisive.”

Michael nods. “The first time I spoke to him, he told me, ‘Universal laws are for lackeys. Context is for kings.’”

Keyla sighs softly, nodding. “So, now...I’d always seen how rules and systems could be inflexible and dehumanizing, and I looked up to people in Starfleet who seemed to hang on to the fullness of being a person despite that. But then, during the war, I saw how leaning into being human, and idolizing those who do, can be taken in dark directions as well. So…” She shrugs. “I guess I’m trying to find a balance. I’m trying to be as human as I can in a organization that can sometimes feel almost dehumanizing. But I’m not necessarily trying to be the most human human, either.”

They sit in silence for several seconds, and Michael looks at Keyla, her lips curved in a smile and an intense and wondering expression in her suddenly moist eyes. “That’s--wow,” she says quietly. “That’s...a really interesting way to look at it. And...thoughtful.” She smiles a little more widely, a hint of teasing in her words even as her eyes stay earnest. “Wise.”

Keyla snorts. “Not sure the word ‘wise’ has ever been applied to me. Especially not when talking about the importance of stupid humor to my conceptualization of my place in the universe.”

Michael grins. “Hey, we all have our skills. And now I know who to come to, if I ever have a report to finish and need a good threat.”

Keyla smirks. “Any time.”

Michael grins, then sobers, hesitating slightly before she speaks. Twisting her hands slightly in her lap, she adds, “What happened to me before the Discovery makes things like that...important to me, still. Because it was...cold, in a way, and rigid, and isolating, and so having someone not just follow protocol but prioritize being human...being a friend...to me...it means a lot. Thank you.”

Keyla tilts her head, curious, trying to figure out what Michael means. The Battle of the Binary Stars was terrible, but filled, surely, with all too much light and heat, conflict and people and humanity?

“Prison,” Michael responds quietly to the question in Keyla’s eyes. “I was in prison for six months before I arrived on the Discovery.”

Keyla feels herself startle internally. She had forgotten, somehow, that Michael had spent the months before she appeared on the Discovery in a Federation prison. At the time, she’d been too full of anger and confusion to think about what had happened to her former friend and commanding officer. Now, seeing Michael standing on the bridge of the Discovery, an ordinary, uniformed first officer, makes it all too easy to forget, and silently, Keyla chastises herself for doing so.

Well, this is her chance to turn that around, now that Michael has broached the subject. To show Michael that if she wants to talk about that part of her life, Keyla isn’t going to flinch away.

“It was...isolating?” she asks, looking at Michael.

Michael nods. “It was…” She pauses, and continues, “It was very humane. No bad treatment. No harsh punishments, not even when I had to...when I got in fights.”

 _When I had to defend myself._ Keyla feels something twist inside her, the horror of what the consequences were for _Michael_ of the admiralty publicly laying the blame on her for an entire war hitting home for the first time.

“But it was very…very sterile,” Michael continues softly. Her fingers bunch the blankets in her lap, twisting them tightly, even as her voice stays steady. “The Federation guards just...followed protocol. Neutral faces. Everything happened according to schedules and rules. Not that there’s anything wrong with that but it was...it was all protocol, a system, so stiff and mechanical and...cold.” She swallows. “And I’m...it was better than it could have been. A few guards did act more _human_. Thought we should be left to our own devices, as it were, and that...wasn’t good either. Only time I stepped into a fight myself,” she adds, her voice wavering just a bit, “because someone else was getting beaten on, and I was the only one there who...in that moment, I felt like I still had to be a Starfleet officer, that I needed to...that Philippa would have wanted me to… Anyway.” She shakes her head slightly, as though to pull herself from the memories. “Most of the time, though, the whole place ran all by rules, and that made it...safe, physically...but just...cold. Isolating.” She looks up at Keyla, admitting quietly, “Though while I was there, I was also dissociating most of the time. My foster mom came to visit me every couple months, and even then, I just...answered her questions mechanically. When I remember it, it’s almost like it happened to someone else.” She stares at the floor in front of her, continuing softly, “So that may have added another layer to the separation I remember between me and my surroundings and the people around me, even at the times when there was someone around me who was warm to me. That might increase how cold and isolating I remember it as. But that’s what I remember about it, now. How isolating and sterile a...community...it was. How stiff and how cold.” She shakes her head again, as though pushing the memories away.

Keyla swallows, finding herself unsure what to say. She can’t get the image out of her head, now: Michael being struck by fists and feet, alone, probably outnumbered, before a guard stepped in. If a guard stepped in. _She_ can’t get it out of her head, and she’s the one who’s only imagining it, not the one who lived it.

And yet Michael mentioned the violence only incidentally, telling her that what she remembers most is isolation and cold.

“They shouldn’t have done that to you,” she says hoarsely. “That shouldn’t have happened to you. I’m sorry.”

Michael’s eyes widen slightly and she looks at Keyla, shaking her head. “It wasn’t--part of it was on me. We’re not in the dark ages anymore. They did have enrichment, classes, activities. I didn’t do them.”

Keyla shakes her head. “Because you needed a damn counselor,” she says roughly. “Not because you needed to, to just be left alone.”

“Philippa said the same thing,” Michael says, quietly, after a moment, then adds, smiling a bit wryly, “Philippa went ballistic.”

 _“Good.”_ Belatedly, Keyla remembers her basic psych training for talking with trauma survivors. “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t be trying to, to interpret your experiences for you. I’m just sorry that--that what happened to you happened.”

“It’s okay.” Michael half-nudges her shoulder against Keyla’s, smiling. “It’s human.”

Keyla smiles. “Hey, I try.”

Michael nods. “Which is what we were originally talking about, really. Sorry for derailing that conversation. I...think it makes a lot of sense, what you said. We all used to have different ways of making sense of the universe and our place in it, and the war messed a lot of those up for a lot of us. If your way of being a Starfleet officer was about being a person first to be a better officer...I’m glad you’re finding you way to doing that again.” She smiles. “Especially if it enables you to deliver a well-timed threat of an ass-kicking. With your noodle arms.”

“Hey!” Keyla says, grinning. “I _do_ work out, you know.”

Michael looks at Keyla’s biceps, then raises an eyebrow in an expression so eloquent that Keyla snorts.

“All right, shut up. Commander.”

Michael grins at her, and Keyla smiles back. Sobering slightly, she adds, “Also? Not a derail. You can talk about that with me, if you want,” she offers quietly. “You were way too alone for way too long. None of us want you to be alone with what happened now.”

“Thank you, Keyla,” Michael whispers, looking at her with eyes filled with surprised emotion.

“Maybe it’ll help to know that even someone who was pretty damn angry at you at the time still thinks that the way you were treated was disgusting?” Keyla adds with tentative humor, hoping that the words will land right, hoping that it isn’t too much or not enough or wrong, hoping, hoping, hoping.

“I...I want to say, ‘I don’t know if I deserve that kind of help with this particular thing,’” says Michael, quietly, as though thinking out the words as she says them. “And maybe...maybe that means that I need it.”

Keyla swallows, then bumps her shoulder against Michael’s. “Hey, if you need it, it’s here.”

Her tricorder beeps a quiet reminder alarm, and she flips it open, silencing the beeping. “Time for me to wake up Sylvia,” she tells Michael, taking a long breath and rising to her feet. “Thanks, Michael. For letting me talk about...all my stuff.”

“No problem,” Michael says quietly, then adds in a teasing voice, “Your ‘stuff’ is very anthropologically interesting.”

“Pfft. You science officers.” Keyla steps toward the gap in the wall, and is just about to duck through the opening when Michael’s voice stops her.

“Keyla?”

“Yeah?” she responds, turning back to meet Michael’s gaze.

Michael gives her a small, earnest smile, a tired but affectionate warmth in her eyes. “You do ‘human’ pretty well.”

Keyla feels a shy, grateful smile spread across her own face. She looks Michael in the eye. “You do too.”


	7. Signals

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I was really hoping to finish the fic this weekend, but at this point, I’m going to be busy with family and Christmas for the next few days, so I will be posting the final chapter some time later this coming week! :)
> 
> If you're wondering whether the snow flurry in this chapter is a meta joke on me for not finishing my fall seasonal fic til December, it 100% is. ;)
> 
> No chapter-specific content warnings beyond the tags for this one, aside from more food shortage (and swearing).

“Another five minutes,” Georgiou pants quietly as the two officers make their way over yet another rocky verge, “and we’ll take another rest break.”

“Sounds good,” Joann says, attempting to put a smile into her voice. For the last hour, she has thought only of trying to put one foot in front of the other, breathing deeply and evenly as they hiked up and down hills, skirting boulders and brambles as a brief flurry of snow sent flakes brushing against their skin and melting against the ground. She hasn’t passed out again, though there have been a few moments when her vision cut out entirely and she stumbled along with only the constant gentle pressure of Georgiou’s hand under her arm to guide her, and one near miss where she abruptly opened her eyes to find her commanding officer half-catching her around the shoulders. So maybe, technically, she has passed out again. But not for _long_.

She has no idea how Georgiou has endured so steadily throughout the entire ordeal, much less balanced her way across the rough terrain with one hand lightly supporting Joann. Even as Georgiou’s eyes have gone hazy and her voice has faded to an exhausted mumble, her limbs have carried her unflaggingly towards their destination. _The woman is superhuman._

They stop to rest on a fallen log under a beautiful tree that looks something like an oak, its curved brown leaves piled in drifts around them.

Joann pulls out her miniaturized tricorder as Georgiou takes a drink from a water bag. “Two kilometers,” she says. “Only forty minutes to go.”

Georgiou smiles faintly. “We’re practically there.”

“We sure are.” Joann scans her, seeing nothing more alarming than the normal warning signs of a human body starved for energy, and passes her the tricorder.

As Georgiou scans her in turn, Joann opens the communicator, noticing some odd feedback as she begins to attempt to transmit the standard greeting signal they’ve been trying as they got closer to communications range. Frowning, she accepts her tricorder back from Georgiou and uses it to scan their surroundings, studying the numbers scrolling across the screen and then pressing a few more buttons to confirm them.

“Captain, we’ve entered a natural interference field. A strong one. We won’t be able to transmit much of a signal through this, never mind anything clear enough to communicate verbally.”

“I see,” Georgiou murmurs, closing her eyes and rubbing her forehead.

“Normally we wouldn’t be able to send or receive a signal at all, but…” Joann frowns, calculating in her head. “I studied fields like this one at the place. Thing. The Academy. Senior research project for one of my classes.” She flips the communicator open, staring at it through her suddenly-swimming vision. “If I just set it _here_ and _here_ ,” she continues, pressing buttons in quick sequence as her vision clears, “and then do _this--_ ” She flips the communicator over, popping the back panel off and tweaking one of the wires inside the controls. “It should boost any signal we send nearly to normal range.” She jams another few buttons, starting the signal broadcasting. “There we go. We’re signalling.”

Georgiou nods, pushing herself back to her feet. “Excellent work, Lieutenant.”

Joann takes another drink of water before tucking the bag back into her pack and carefully standing. “Thank you, Captain.”

 

“Sylvia, if I trip over this fucking spanner one more time you’re gonna find it in your bunk tonight!” Keyla hollers.

“I _told_ you not to step in my work zone,” Sylvia calls back across the campsite, taking a petulant sip of coffee. “What do you need, a flashing neon sign?”

Michael glares at them both from the cocoon of blankets Keyla has ordered her to stay in. “If both of you don’t stop bickering _right now_ , I’m going to take these blankets off and strip down to my underwear!”

Sylvia chokes on her coffee. “Michael!” she admonishes when she stops coughing, giggling helplessly.

“All right, I think we’re all exhausted and, and under a lot of pressure,” Michael manages, biting back a chuckle, once they’ve all stopped laughing. “But this planet hasn’t killed us, so let’s try not to kill each other.”

Sylvia grins sheepishly, and Keyla smiles. “Right. That’s a copy. Over.”

Michael rolls her eyes. “I don’t think you have any idea how old radio lingo works. And, Sylvia, you’ve been working for hours. Five-minute break.”

“Mmm.” Sylvia flops down where she’s sitting, then winces, pulling a miniature screwdriver out from under the small of her back. Keyla laughs, and Michael smiles, rolling her eyes again.

After five minutes, the clicking and whirring of Sylvia’s work starts up again, and Michael feels her eyelids drooping, lulled by the now-familiar sound. She is still exhausted at a level beyond what she feels after even the most grueling training session, and she is just beginning to drift to sleep again when she hears a faint beeping sound. She isn’t certain what it is about the sound that makes her open her eyes—after all, the various pieces of technology Sylvia is wrangling have been beeping, trilling, and, on one memorable occasion, combusting for the last four hours Michael has out in the campsite—but some piece of training or observation pulls at the back of her mind, and she blinks awake, squinting.

The first thing she sees is Keyla, frozen, staring at the tricorder propped on a crate near the edge of the clearing. Michael realizes that her own ear must have subconsciously recognized the sound, a standard detection alert, or caught the direction it was coming from, maybe, but it doesn’t matter now, doesn’t matter at all, because Keyla is stumbling toward the tricorder and picking it up, staring at Michael and Sylvia with wide eyes. “It’s a Starfleet signal. A Starfleet _tricorder_ signal.” Her voice breaks on the last words, and she looks down again, punching buttons. Her voice is thin and cracking as she says, “It’s only a kilometer away—“

Michael doesn’t even remember getting up, but she is staring over Keyla’s shoulder at the tricorder, and Sylvia is on Keyla’s other side with her arm around Keyla’s waist, rubbing her back. For another millisecond, all three officers stare at the tricorder in Keyla’s hand. Then Michael is saying, “Let’s go,” and Keyla is grabbing the first aid kits, throwing one to Sylvia, who slings it over her shoulder.

“Michael—" says Keyla.

Michael whirls. “I’m not staying behind. I don’t need to stay behind.” She can bear the pleading in her own voice.

Keyla shakes her head. “Just let me scan you,” she says, holding out the medical tricorder, and Michael stays still for an agonizing few seconds as Keyla scans her and peers at the screen. “All right,” she says, snapping it closed and half-smiling. “Let’s go.”

 

Joann is making her way toward the bottom of a rise, focusing on putting one foot in front of the other, when she becomes aware of a sudden lack of presence by her side. She turns, looking back up the rise towards Georgiou, who has come to a standstill a few steps behind her, staring into the forest ahead of them. Joann whirls, peering into the distance, where a figure, no, two figures in blue are visible, moving through the trees. No, three figures. She stares. Blue uniform, red hair, the glint of a cortical implant.

Keyla.

She is halfway to Keyla, weaving through the trees with the wind in her ears and wings on her feet, before she even realizes that she is running. She can sense Georgiou just behind her, but other than that, there is nothing in the world but Joann and the three figures she is running towards, who are now running toward her as well, the seconds passing like syrup as Keyla’s face becomes visible, and then her eyes, and then the two halves of the away team are reaching each other, Joann and Keyla slowing just enough to avoid crashing into each other as they meet, outstretched arms wrapping around each other and hands tangling in hair. Joann pulls back a few centimeters, just enough to look at Keyla, alive and unhurt and _here,_ her beautiful eyes looking back at Joann with love and astonishment and relief, and then their lips meet and they are kissing, kissing in a way that Joann has never kissed anyone before in her life, seconds drifting by with nothing in the universe but their kiss. Keyla’s lips are warm and soft, her cheeks and forehead cool from the autumnal air around them, and her hands are on Joann’s back, pulling her close. Joann can feel Keyla’s breasts pressed against her; can feel Keyla’s warmth against her body and--yes, that’s some of Keyla’s hair in her mouth. She pulls away, making a _pllfft_ noise as she swipes at the hair, which makes Keyla laugh helplessly, holding her at arms’ length and gazing at her for a moment before their lips meet again, more gently this time, their surroundings drifting back into focus. Georgiou and Michael and Sylvia are tangled together in an embrace a few centimeters to her left. Michael is weeping.

“Joann,” Keyla whispers, as she and Joann pull apart to stare into each other’s eyes. “Joann--” Her eyes are shining with life and love and wonder, and Joann stares back at her, drinking in the sight of the most beautiful woman in the galaxy, here and safe in her arms.

Then Sylvia barrels into Joann from the side, hugging her tightly and squealing her name, and Joann hugs her back, one hand still clasped around Keyla’s as Georgiou steps forward to put her hand on Keyla’s shoulder, tilting her towards her in a concerned inspection that turns into an embrace.

“You’re okay,” Sylvia is saying into her shoulder. “Oh, Joann, I am so so so happy you’re okay. Oh my god, _you’re okay_ , you’re okay you’re okay you’re okay.”

Joann hugs her friend tightly. “You’re okay,” she says, then adds, peering over Sylvia’s shoulder at the rest of the group in wonder, “We’re all okay.”

Sylvia gives Joann another squeeze, then lets her go, and Keyla slides an arm back around her. “What happened?” she asks Joann and Georgiou hoarsely.

“Our shuttle exploded,” Georgiou says, “about sixty kilometers from here. We parachuted out, and caught some electrical readings from you when we landed. After that, we made our way here. We ran out of food earlier today, but we have had an uneventful enough journey other than that.”

Michael wipes the tears from her face with the back of her hand. “We knew Starfleet’s toughest would be alright. Right, Keyla?”

“Absolutely.” Keyla detaches herself from Joann’s side. “Hand me that medkit, Sylv?”

“Did you two sleep last night?” Michael asks in concern.

Georgiou nods. “We had a lovely campfire. Or two.” She chuckles, and Joann starts laughing as well while Michael and Sylvia watch them in befuddlement.

Keyla is scanning them both with the medical tricorder, popping open the first aid kit to give them a series of hyposprays in quick succession before tearing open two thin, squishy nutrient bars. “Eat these as we walk. Slowly. Mouse nibbles.”

Joann nods, and Keyla clips the medical tricorder to her belt, threading her arm back around Joann. “Any injuries I should know about?”

“We’re both a bit sore from the parachute landing, and certainly feeling the lack of calories,” Georgiou reports, “but no injuries other than that, and we found enough fruit to keep us from getting too wobbly.”

“Philippa, you’re wobbling on your feet _right now_ ,” Michael admonishes, laying one hand on Georgiou’s back and placing her other palm under her elbow. “Let’s get you both back to camp.”

“I might be wobbly now,” Georgiou protests as the group stops walking, “but I wasn’t earlier. Tell Commander Burnham that I wasn’t wobbly earlier, Lieutenant.”

“She wasn’t,” Joann confirms. “I was seeing stars, but Captain Georgiou just kept scooting us both along. I think she’s superhuman.”

“See, Michael?” Georgiou says smugly. “Although I would like to register that Lieutenant Owosekun’s technical skills make her superhuman if any of us are,” she adds. “If she hadn’t figured out the proper way to boost the signal, none of us would yet be reunited.”

“Anyway,” Sylvia puts in, as Keyla gives Joann an adoring look and squeezes her tightly, “none of us are even in the running for most superhuman endurance on this mission after what happened to Michael.”

“Yeah, Michael,” Keyla chimes in, “wait til you’ve been back on your own feet for more than an hour before you start fussing over everyone else.”

 _“What?”_ Georgiou demands, coming to a halt and taking Michael’s shoulders to spin her to face her, looking her up and down. “What ‘happened to Michael?’”

“She’s doing really well, Captain,” Keyla assures her quickly. “We wouldn’t have even let her come along if she wasn’t pretty much completely recovered.”

_“What happened--”_

“She saved the shuttle from disintegrating when we crashed and then she got trapped on a rock in the middle of a freezing river for twelve hours,” Sylvia squeaks, “and it was actually really a pretty bad and scary situation but we sent her some supplies and beamed her back as soon as we got the transporter working and Keyla’s been scanning her every hour just to be safe even after she recovered from the hypothermia and as you can see,” she finishes, giving a little finger wave in Michael’s direction, “she’s doing really well!”

Georgiou stares Michael up and down again, eyes wide. Raising a trembling hand, she cups Michael’s cheek for a moment before seizing both of her hands in hers, examining them as though she might have missed a finger lost to frostbite. “And you weren’t going to tell me this?” she demands in a strangled tone of voice.

“I was _going_ to tell you,” Michael says, glaring at Sylvia and Keyla. “I was going to bring you back to camp and make you some hot chocolate and then I was going to tell you.”

Georgiou ignores her, grabbing her shoulder with one hand and taking her pulse with the other. “Did you bring a medical tricorder?” she asks Keyla over her shoulder. “Have you scanned her since she started walking? Is this the first time she’s exerted herself? Did she experience any cardiac arrhythmia? Was there cellular damage?”

Keyla unclips the medical tricorder from her belt again. “Right here. I scanned her twenty minutes ago and her vital readings were normal. She initially had a low bpm but no arrhythmia, and her vital readings returned to normal parameters seventy minutes after she was beamed back and have been steady ever since. No frostbite or other damage.”

She hands the tricorder to Georgiou, whose hands are shaking so badly that she drops it onto the carpet of orange leaves. Joann bends to pick it up, handing it gently to Georgiou. Keyla’s face is a mask of anxiety, Michael looks like she wants to melt into the ground, and Sylvia is staring anxiously between the three of them as though she is watching a ping-pong match.

Georgiou scans Michael, exhaling as the readings scroll across the small screen, then stands staring at the tricorder as though she doesn’t quite know what to do with it.

Through a fog of lightheaded exhaustion, Joann remembers what Georgiou said when she woke from her nightmare. _Touch helps._ “I can take that, Captain,” she says, reaching for the tricorder with both hands and passing it back to Keyla with one hand, cradling Georgiou’s hand for another few moments with the other.

As the group starts walking again, Joann catches Michael’s eye and tips her head meaningfully toward Georgiou. Michael stops looking embarrassed, her eyes widening in understanding, and she reaches out, placing one hand on Georgiou’s back and the other under her elbow once again. “I’m okay, Philippa,” she murmurs. “I’m okay, and we’re all okay, and we’re almost there.”

Joann takes the last mouse nibble of her nutrition bar and reaches for Keyla’s hand, because her vision is swimming again and she is suddenly sure that she has never been so tired. She wonders if she is going to pass out again, mouse nibbles of calories or no mouse nibbles of calories, but the soft darkness doesn’t wrap around her, her feet safely carrying her the final leg of their journey at Keyla’s side.

For a time there is no sound but the crunch of footsteps against fallen leaves and the steady background hum of moving water, a quiet finally broken by Sylvia’s excited intake of breath. “We’re here! We’re almost there!”

Peering ahead of her, Joann can see the side of a shuttle through the trees. “I’ll start the fire again and get some nutrient hot chocolate going,” Sylvia says, bouncing ahead of the group with a burst of energy of indeterminate source.

Keyla squeezes Joann’s hand. “Almost home.”

“Home away from home?”

“Exactly.”

“Away-mission-home. Home is where the away mission is.”

“Home is where the crashed shuttle is.”

They aren’t making much sense, or being particularly funny, but they both start giggling.

The trees open up to a clearing a dozen meters from a bend in a wide, rushing river, and Joann takes in the sight of the other half of the away team’s campsite. The shuttle, lying where it must have been washed by the river, is wrent open, and she feels cold at the thought of Keyla and Sylvia and Michael getting tossed around inside it as it disintegrated in the river. She’ll need to find the time to thank Michael, from the bottom of her heart, for saving them all.

Aside from the broken shuttle, the campsite is quite cheery, regulation-design crates of supplies and pieces of equipment providing a familiar Starfleet presence against the crisp golden leaves blanketing the ground. There is a matter synthesizer surrounded by tools and pieces of tech on one side of the camp, presumably Sylvia’s work area, and a pile of firewood next to a bucket of water. By the small fire, Sylvia is mixing nutrient hot chocolate and unwrapping ration bars.

Keyla grabs a blanket from on top of a crate, letting go of Joann to fold it into quarters before taking hold of Joann’s hand again and leading her across the campsite, laying the blanket at the side of the shuttle. “Sit down, Joann,” she says gently, helping Joann lower herself to the ground. Joann leans back against the shuttle, stretching her tired legs out and letting out a long sigh.

Keyla is hovering over her, and Joann tugs her gently toward her. “You’re okay. You’re really okay,” she murmurs, her hands tracing Keyla’s hair, her cheek, her collarbone. “You’re okay.”

“You’re okay. Oh, Joann, you’re okay. You’re here. You’re _here_ ,” Keyla says, leaning her forehead against Joann’s, and then they’re kissing again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Whew! Finally. ;)
> 
> Michael’s “I was going to tell you” line was directly inspired by the similar line in Iron Man 2, “I was going to tell you; I was gonna make you an omelette and tell you.”
> 
> As I mentioned, I’ll have the final chapter up some time later this coming week (somehow, I don’t feel too bad pausing on this particular chapter as a stopping place. ;)


	8. Mission Critical

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, I ended up going back to the old potential plan of a Ch8 and a Ch9, admittedly mostly because I said I would have the next chapter up by the end of this week, and I definitely did not end up having time to get a full concluding chapter finished. I really need to stop publicly giving myself even casual fake deadlines because then I feel obligated to meet them even though writing always takes much more time than I think it will. Anyhow, pursuant to all that, here is Ch8, and Ch9 will be up...I hope some time next week, but to be on the safe side, I’m gonna just say “some time in the first half of January.” ;)
> 
> The pain scale Keyla keeps mentioning is something like [this](https://www.google.com/search?q=pain+scale&client=firefox-b-1-ab&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiwt-Sb1MffAhVjQt8KHRgAB2cQ_AUIDigB&biw=1280&bih=646#imgrc=hLlK90SUNyW8_M:) (edit #2: accidentally linked to a meme version, now fixed) (note to self to find a better link than a hotlink to Google images, to be added later!), which is much more helpful than asking someone to rate their pain on a scale of 1-10 with no context for what each number means (I recommend saving a pain scale graphic with clear verbal descriptions of each level somewhere easily accessible on your phone! super useful!), and I headcanon that in the 23rd century it's a standardized scale that all Starfleet officers are familiar with.
> 
> chapter-specific additional content warnings: more food shortage references

Keyla pulls away from Joann only at the call of further medic duty, leaning forward again to kiss her once more lightly on the lips before heading over to Sylvia. She returns with a quarter of a ration bar and a small cup of nutrient-laced hot chocolate each for Joann and Captain Georgiou, who, Joann is mildly embarrassed to realize, has been sitting against the shuttle plating only a few meters away from her and Keyla for the last few minutes, talking with Michael. It’s a good thing she’s more of a stickler for Starfleet principles than she is a stickler for Starfleet protocol. Joann isn’t, she realizes, actually precisely sure of the Starfleet protocol for making out extensively while on duty, but she’s pretty sure it’s something along the lines of “don’t.”

She accepts the food from Keyla and sits up, crossing her legs and feeling as though she is at a mildly bizarre picnic. Keyla bounces back from another check of the perimeter scanners and sits in front of them, stifling a yawn, and relief fills Joann’s heart anew at the thought that now, they’ll all be able to start getting a reasonable amount of sleep. Every member of the away team is visibly exhausted, and the thought of sharing shifts between the five of them fills her with happy anticipation both for curling up for a real eight hours and for seeing the dark smudges disappear from beneath Keyla’s eyes.

Despite how slowly Joann eats her small portion, her stomach begins to ache fiercely. She tries sitting back, but that makes it worse.

Keyla notices her grimace. “Stomach cramps?”

Joann nods. “I didn’t think it would be this bad. We even had some of that fruit this morning.”

“How much does it hurt on a scale of one to ten?”

Joann runs over the pain scale in her mind. “Four.”

“All right. Let me know if it gets any worse,” Keyla says in her most official medic voice. “When the pain eases, we’ll try to have you eat a little more. Captain?”

“Five,” Georgiou says quietly, after a moment. Joann is both surprised and impressed. This might be the first time she has ever heard a Starfleet commanding officer voluntarily admit to being in more pain than someone under their command.

“All right, you keep me updated as well,” Keyla says, still in her medic voice, as she stands to check the sensors again, and Georgiou nods, smiling proudly at her when her back is turned.

Sylvia plonks down in front of both of them. “Do you want to know what Keyla did while I was trying to fix the synthesizer?” she asks.

Joann nods, smiling at the very overt offer of a distraction.

“She kept _wandering_ into my workspace. While I was working on this _very mission-critical_ task,” Sylvia says in a dramatically aghast tone, widening her eyes in mock shock. “And then she kept tripping over my spanner.” Sylvia mimes this action in the air, walking two fingers along and then crumpling them dramatically. “Boom! Bang! Thunk! And then, she had the gall to blame me and threaten to leave the spanner in my bunk that night, like little kids camping and leaving worms in each other’s beds!”

Keyla’s voice drifts across the campsite from behind them. “Hey!”

 

As the sun drops lower in the sky, the five members of the away team sit in a circle by the smoldering fire to organize and plan out the remaining two days until the Discovery finds them. Keyla stifles a yawn as she sinks to the ground, pulling her legs together to sit crosslegged.

“Sleep shifts,” Philippa says, tapping her pencil lightly against the formerly soaked and now dried paper notebook serving as meeting record in lieu of a functioning PADD. “Would seem to be a priority.” The corner of her mouth lifts as her gaze pans over her colleagues’ exhausted faces.

Keyla stifles the end of another relevantly-timed yawn. “No one’s been getting much sleep,” she acknowledges, “especially not Sylvia, between setting up camp and rescuing Michael and amount of repair work to be done.”

“All right,” Georgiou says, smiling at Sylvia, who is clearly pouring every bit of remaining energy into sitting upright and looking attentively at her captain, but whose eyes drift close every few seconds only for her to blink fiercely several times as she opens them again. “Now that the synthesizer repairs are no longer a matter of potential life and death for your missing colleagues, you should be the first to get a full eight hours, Ensign. Your sleep shift can start as soon as we finish meeting. Owosekun and I got the most sleep last night; Burnham and Detmer, you take six hours starting near sunset, go on watch for four hours, and go back down for another four hours’ sleep into the morning.”

“Captain, I’ve been sleeping all day,” Michael protests, at the same time as Keyla says, “I’m just fine, Captain, I don’t need to be on the first shift!”

“Two officers given a chance to get some rest, neither of them taking it…” Philippa eyes them. “Commander Burnham _would_ seem to have a valid point about her own fitness for duty. Will it temper your own nobility somewhat, Lieutenant Detmer, if the commander joins me for the first watch, and you sit your watch with Lieutenant Owosekun?” she asks drily, glancing at Joann.

Keyla feels herself blush. “It, I mean, yes, I--whatever works best for the schedule, Captain.”

Sylvia snickers.

After few minutes of further polite bickering, the schedule is ironed out, and Philippa hands the floor over to Sylvia for a technical update.

“I finally got the synthesizer partially functional,” she reports proudly, blinking fully awake again and tucking an escaped strand of hair behind her ear. “It’s running, but it can synthesize uniform substances, that’s all. What we need to fix it and to fix the transporter for good is a better power source, so I thought, why not synthesize materials that can be reacted to give us chemical power? Nothing explosive,” she adds hastily. “Just some reactions that will go along at a nice safe simmer and give us much more juice than our one surviving emergency fuel cell can. So, I started putting those together, and if I did everything right and if the reaction works the way I think it will work, we might have enough power to kickstart the rest of our tech by morning.”

“Excellent work, Ensign,” Philippa says, smiling. Sylvia looks like she might melt with pride at the words.

“For the rest of the night," she continues, "let’s focus on keeping watch, staying organized, and maintaining our sensors and equipment. Tomorrow, we can work on assisting Ensign Tilly and working on other repairs--and perhaps even get some rudimentary survey data, if all goes well.” She gazes around at each member the away team. “Is there anything else we need to discuss?”

No one says anything, and Philippa smiles. “All right. Dismissed.”

As the officers stand, Joann drifts to Keyla’s side once again, and Keyla wraps her arm around her as they head for the fire. Michael grabs a tricorder for a sensor sweep, Sylvia stumbles toward the pile of blankets in the shuttle, and Philippa says something about finding the real, non-vitamin-fortified hot chocolate, heading over to the food crates that form the walls of the campsite’s makeshift kitchen.

“Looking forward to getting back to the ship, and where our poor commanding officers can take notes on real PADDs and we can all sleep in real beds?” Keyla murmurs to Joann, leaning her cheek against her shoulder.

“Yes.” Joann grins, pressing a kiss to the top of Keyla’s forehead. “But somehow, I don’t mind being on this planet nearly as much as I did this morning.”

“Oh really?” Keyla nestles closer against her, sighing in contentment.

Joann smiles. “Oh, _really_.”

 

“Sylvia, you heard the captain’s orders, right?” Michael asks, as Sylvia checks the readings on her buckets of chemical reactants. “You can get some sleep. You _should_ get some sleep.”

Sylvia glances back at Michael, her eyes anxious. “Do you really think it’s okay to take such a long break from trying to power up the synthesizer? I mean, we might not need to rescue you and Joann and Captain Georgiou anymore, but we’re still low on energy, and emergency medical supplies, and spare clothes, and _weapons…_ ”

“Well, we don’t need to worry about danger from hostile aliens or wild animals,” Michael jokes, gesturing vaguely at Philippa, who is still half-inside a crate rummaging for hot chocolate packets. “Now that Captain Georgiou is here, we’ll be safer than anyone else in Starfleet.”

Philippa pops out of the crate, her ponytail flipping back over her shoulder. “You mean my reputation as a scrupulous Starfleet captain has preceded me even to this part of the quadrant?” she asks cheerfully. “No hostile intruders would dare approach lest I order them to scrub out the exhaust manifolds and straighten their uniform collars?”

“Yes, Philippa, that’s _exactly_ what I meant,” Michael replies blandly, biting back a smile. “I’m not even on Vulcan and I’m surrounded by people who can unerringly read my mind.”

“And don’t you forget it,” Philippa says cheerily, her voice growing muffled as she plunges back into the crate.

Michael rolls her eyes. “Sylvia, are you almost finished checking on that reaction?” she prompts hopefully.

Sylvia takes a single step back from her containers, staring at them pensively. “I’m not getting any reaction readings. What if I did something wrong?”

“Well, if you did, you can work on it after you get some rest,” Michael says. “Besides, you said it yourself. The reaction needs to sit.”

“Yes, but this long?” Sylvia bites her lip. “Well, maybe it _is_ supposed to be this long. I don’t know if it’s supposed to take this long with this formula in these quantities! Maybe I should do some more calculations…”

“Ensign Tilly, our away team’s first priority right now is to get some sleep,” Philippa says, appearing at Sylvia’s shoulder. Evidently unable to find the non-fortified hot chocolate, she is holding a box of instant coffee and two tins of sweetened condensed milk, which Michael cannot help but feel is sending a somewhat mixed message. Fortunately, Sylvia is too caught up in her own dilemma to notice.

“What if I didn’t do it right? What if I failed and everything is going to go wrong--”

“Sylvia,” Michael says, “remember that we’re not in a crisis any more. If your reaction doesn’t react, all that happens is that we don’t get a little extra technical support. We’re already here, and together, and safe.”

Sylvia nods blearily, then glances anxiously at her reaction. “It just doesn’t seem to be reacting at all, and, and, what if I used the wrong kind of acid? Wait, did I punch in water correctly on the synthesizer? _What if I used the wrong kind of water?_ ”

Michael opens her mouth and closes it again. Philippa catches her tired eye and gives her a discreet nod, acknowledging that _no, there is no winning answer to that question except ‘Sylvia, go the fuck to sleep.’_

Stepping forward, she rests a gentle hand on Sylvia’s shoulder. “Sylvia, you told us the reaction could take a few hours to start working. Why don’t we _all_ get some rest and come back to it in the morning?”

Sylvia lifts her eyes to meet Philippa’s and nods dazedly.

“Sounds _great_ ,” Philippa continues encouragingly, as though Sylvia had responded with a hearty confirmation. “Let’s just head over to the shuttle, and you can get all snug and warm, and rest that smart engineering brain of yours.”

Sylvia begins to snore as soon as her head hits the makeshift pillow, and Philippa shoots Michael a grin. “There she goes.”

Michael smiles. “Indeed.” With a last fond look at Sylvia, she turns to head towards the edge of the campsite, growing dim in the rapid nightfall. “Ready for our watch?”

Philippa nods, detouring back towards the kitchen area. “Let’s start with a snack and a hot drink.”

“Sounds like an excellent plan, Captain,” Michael says with a grin, following her.

Philippa deposits the coffee onto the makeshift counter and pushes it off to the side, a little sadly, before reaching instead for a can of condensed juice. “Probably best not to jack one’s heartrate around a few hours after running one’s blood sugar into the floor. Time to be a good role model for my junior officers and save the coffee to drink with a full meal in the morning, hmm?” she asks, nodding towards Joann, Keyla, and the sleeping Sylvia.

Michael feels a rush of affection for Philippa and her willingness to, at least sometimes, lead by example. She means to banter back about Philippa’s life decisions being very properly Starfleet, or about how Sylvia is too fast asleep to know whether Philippa is being a good role model or not, or how she’s sure the coffee will taste all the sweeter in the morning, especially with the hideous amount of sugar Philippa is sure to add. Instead, she finds herself saying, “Thanks for not making me worry about you, Philippa. I think--” Her voice cracks. “I think I’ve really had enough of that for this away mission.”

Philippa turns to her, opening her arms, and Michael melts into her embrace. “I think I’ve had quite enough of being afraid for you for this away mission, too,” Philippa says quietly, squeezing her tightly.

Michael squeezes her back, and Philippa melts against her for a few seconds before turning back towards the counter, her voice brightening. “Hey, if we mix the condensed milk with the condensed juice and add some of those roasted nuts, it will taste like a melted ais kacang!”

Michael grins, wiping a stray tear from her eye in the darkness. “Sounds like a plan.”


	9. Almost Autumn

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For something that I originally intended to be around 7k of fluff and light angst, this certainly, uh, expanded. Writing this fic has been an adventure; thank you so much for reading along and for all your lovely comments along the way! :)
> 
> No real additional content warnings for this chapter except more of the same re: tags and previous chapters. There is also a little more discussion of the war in this chapter.
> 
> You still don’t need to have read any of my other fics before reading this one, but this chapter ended up using some things from my other Georgiou Lives/Culber Lives ‘verse fics--from my Joann x Keyla get-together fic [Falling Tides](https://archiveofourown.org/works/15775800), that Sylvia and Joann are friends (hopefully already apparent in previous chapters, but their prior friendship comes up more here!), and from my Georgiou Lives fic [Rainstorm](https://archiveofourown.org/works/16194077) (or really...the beginning notes from Rainstorm...because I still haven’t actually addressed this within any fic…) that Philippa is alive because she and the Shenzhou were brought forward in time to the end of the war (possibly by Ripper trying to do something nice for Michael).
> 
> (As a side note, Falling Tides is actually a Culber Lives fic but not a Georgiou Lives fic--I didn’t start out trying to create a single unified AU, but rather wrote some post-Season-1 Georgiou Lives and/or Culber Lives and/or Joann x Keyla fics that ended up coming together as a loosely-affiliated post-Season-1 AU!)

“Did I tell you,” Joann asks, “that Michael and I have a theory?”

Keyla smiles. “No. What is your theory?”

They are sitting bundled together in blankets in the pre-dawn darkness, shoulders touching as they sit facing away from the fire, keeping watch.

“Have you been wondering,” Joann asks, her excitement endearingly audible in her hushed voice, “whether this planet’s foliage and weather are similar to autumn in Earth’s temporal regions because this planet is undergoing a similar seasonal change, or simply because they coincidentally happen to appear this way year-round?”

“No,” Keyla admits, grinning, “I can’t say I have been wondering about that. Nerd.”

“You hotshot pilots are all alike. Instead of using your brains, you think with your—“

“Hey!” Keyla retorts in a loud whisper, shoving her shoulder against Joann’s. Joann shoves back, and they remember to muffle their giggles only when a particularly loud snore from behind them reminds them of the presence of Sylvia, Michael, and Philippa, asleep in and near the shuttle less than ten meters away.

“So,” Keyla says. “What’s the answer?”

“‘What’s the _theory?’”_ Joann corrects. “Science doesn’t produce answers so easily, Keyla. In fact, technically, since only two of us have contributed to this theory and it hasn’t been agreed upon by the consensus of the scientific community, it’s more of a _hypothesis_.”

“Oh, like _you’re_ such a scientist. Ops is just as applied as piloting is.”

More shoving.

“What’s the _hypothesis_ , Joann?” Keyla asks at last, grinning.

“Well, our _hypothesis_ is that this planet has what we’d think of as two seasons--one for growth, one for, well, this. The leaves fall off the trees, and the weather cools off, but because of the biology of this ecosystem, there’s no real winter--the foliage begins growing again almost immediately. We think something about the angle and spectrum of the sunlight must allow the deciduous plants to grow again in a healthy way without a period of rest, unlike plants on Earth.” She yawns, sleepily melting a little more against Keyla. “So, what we crash-landed into is not _quite_ what we would consider autumn, but almost.”

“Yeah, that tracks,” Keyla mumbles.

Joann sits up straighter against Keyla’s shoulder. “What do you mean?” she murmurs through another yawn.

“Just…” Keyla shrugs, knowing Joann will feel the motion. “Reminds me of a lot of other things, lately. It’s like everything’s an _almost_. An almost-but-not-quite. Having a captain who wasn’t really a captain...serving on a Starfleet ship that mutinied a Starfleet Admiral...falling in love amid all the, the stupid and heartbreaking and terrible consequences of the war...going on a shuttle mission that turned into a shuttle crash…” She shrugs again. “Sometimes our lives...well, my life, anyway...feels like it’s careened into a whole series of ‘almosts.’ Almost Starfleet, almost a normal career, almost peace, almost a happy ending, almost a community, almost a survey mission, almost an anniversary, almost autumn.”

Joann is quiet for a long moment. “Yes,” she says. “I know exactly what you mean.”

Keyla smiles sadly. “I thought you might.”

The sit together for another minute in companionable silence.

“And you just know,” Joann says softly, “that if you tell the wrong--” She laughs. “I almost said ‘adult.’ Just how old do we have to be before we stop thinking of older adults as ‘adults,’ anyway?”

Keyla chuckles.

“If I tell the wrong person,” Joann continues, “they’ll just tell me that that’s how life is; that it’s never exactly what you expect. But this is...this is beyond that. It’s just...I mean, who could have predicted this? Parallel universes? A fucking war? Mutinying a Starfleet admiral to prevent genocide?” She sighs.

Keyla nods. “All my life...through the good stuff and the bad stuff...growing up, going through the Academy, getting my first posting...right up til…” She swallows. “That day on the Shenzhou.” She can’t bring herself to call it _the Battle of the Binary Stars,_ a stiff, chalky name that catches in her throat and belongs in the pages of a history textbook, not on the bridge of a beautiful starship filled with explosions and blood and screaming. “It was all...one narrative. Within the realm of what I thought my life would be; what I thought _life_ would be. And then...then I was on a ship that was at war. And in a parallel universe ruled by an evil empire. And figuring out Starfleet again, while knowing what Starfleet almost became. And becoming disabled, and navigating all of that. Not all of it is bad,” she adds, reaching up absently to stroke the warm metal of her cortical implant, “but it’s just...nothing I ever would have expected, either. Hell, thinking about people I know, Starfleet or not, maybe most adults _do_ have to deal with a whole mound of stuff that they never would have expected. But it’s not like anyone really talks about that, when you’re younger. They don’t talk about all the ways life can go wrong and weird and different, until nothing is quite like you ever thought it would be.”

“No,” Joann says softly. “They don’t.” She is silent for a moment, then adds, “And just because a lot of people go through bad or weird or hard things at one point or another doesn’t mean that any given bad or weird or hard thing isn’t a big deal, or isn’t bad or weird or hard, even so.” She shrugs against Keyla’s shoulder. “I know you know that. I know _I_ know that. But maybe a reminder won’t hurt.”

Keyla smiles, resting her cheek against Joann’s shoulder for a moment. “Thanks.”

“This is one reason I love being with you, Kay,” Joann says quietly, after another pause. “You’re not afraid to talk about things having been bad. You don’t just...gloss over everything like, for instance, Starfleet Command does.”

“Not glossing things over as much as Starfleet Command does is a pretty low bar,” Keyla says wryly, adding more seriously, “but...thanks, Joann. I didn’t know that was something that you...that meant something to you.”

“It is.” Joann tips her head to lean her own cheek against Keyla’s shoulder for a moment. “I--I appreciate you. I appreciate our life together. So much. And I am so glad that we’ve made the choice to make this life, even surrounded by everything we never would have expected.”

“I am too,” Keyla says quietly.

“And,” Joann says softly, with a smile in her voice, “I would contest just one point on your list of almosts.”

“Oh?”

“We may not have gotten to have our cheesy autumnal date, but yesterday was very much our anniversary. No matter what.”

Keyla smiles. “It sure was,” she agrees, with quiet reverence. “And I could not be more grateful to have had you in my life these past six months. Happy anniversary, Joann.”

“Happy anniversary, Keyla.”

They kiss, briefly—they are on watch, after all—and as they turn back to gaze into the darkness, Keyla reaches for Joann’s hand in the blankets.

“We’ll have our cheesy autumn date when we get back to the ship, huh?”

“Absolutely.” Joann squeezes Keyla’s hand. “And hey, as far as planets to crash on go, at least we did end up spending our anniversary on one that lent our autumn date plans a bit of authenticity.”

 _A bit of authenticity._ An idea pops into Keyla’s head at Joann’s words, and, squeezing her partner’s hand, Keyla smiles and stares out into the darkness, thinking.

 

Michael opens her eyes to the sight of warm morning sunlight. She yawns luxuriously, enjoying feeling, if not entirely well-rested from her seven hours of sleep, at least human again, before peering around the campsite.

Sylvia is still fast asleep further inside the shuttle, while Philippa is curled in her nest of blankets between Michael and the gap that forms the shuttle’s entrance, sleeping soundly with a slight smile on her face. Keyla and Joann are sitting by the fire, talking quietly and heating something in a kettle.

Michael stretches, then allows herself to lie in the warmth of her blanket cocoon for another few minutes before yawning again and peeling herself to her feet.

“Good morning,” she says to Joann and Keyla, joining them by the fire.

“Good morning, Commander,” Joann greets her, smiling. “Did you sleep well?”

“I did,” Michael says. “How was the watch?”

“Uneventful,” Joann says. “I told Keyla our theory.”

“She did. Want some coffee?” Keyla asks.

Michael accepts the offer with gratitude. “What do you think?”

“I think you’re both nerds,” Keyla offers. Joann pokes her, and they both giggle. Michael rolls her eyes.

“What’s on the agenda for today, Commander?” Keyla asks with excessive formality as Joann pours herself another cup of coffee.

Michael rolls her eyes again, biting back a smile. “We’ll have to ask our snoozing commanding officer about that, but more of the same, I expect. As this mission’s senior science officer, I intend to suggest that gathering more survey data would be an excellent recreational activity, now that our mission status has been stabilized. And,” she adds drily, “while it will be interesting to see if Sylvia can manage to entirely fix the replicator through sheer force of engineering will, I don’t intend to let her blow anything up attempting to do so.”

Keyla nods seriously. “As this mission’s senior helmswoman, I endorse things not getting blown up in the name of science.”

Now it’s Joann’s turn to roll her eyes. “And as this mission’s senior ops officer, I will attempt to bridge the warring factions of scientific exploration, engineering experimentation, and things not getting blown up.”

Michael smiles in spite of herself, glancing at the chronometer on the tricorder perched on a nearby crate. “I should wake the captain. As for Sylvia...I think we should let her sleep a little longer.”

Keyla chuckles, then adds more seriously, “She’s certainly earned it.”

Yawning again, Michael makes her way over the Philippa’s blanket nest and shakes her shoulder gently. “Philippa.”

“Mmph,” Philippa mutters, snuggling deeper into the blankets.

“Captain!” Michael insists softly, trying to think what the most effective magic words would be. “Mission! Responsibilities! Starfleet!”

Philippa jolts to an upright position, blinking and staring around her. “Wha--Michael!” She smiles sleepily, relaxing slightly as she takes in the quiet campsite. “Good morning!”

“Good morning, Captain,” Michael responds, pointing over to the fire. “Joann and Keyla put the coffee on, if you’re interested, and they report that their watch was uneventful.”

“ _If_ I’m interested?” Philippa raises an eyebrow. “I know you met a strange and twisted version of myself while I was gone, Michael, but I’m not her.”

Michael chuckles in spite of herself as Philippa clambers to her feet, raking her fingers through her hair. “And how are you doing today, Michael?” she asks quietly, pausing before heading for the fire.

“I’m fine. Nothing hurts.” Michael sighs, adding reluctantly. “You can scan me if you want to.”

For a second she thinks Philippa is going to take her up on it, but she exhales and smiles instead, even if her smile seems just a bit forced, the faintest residual flicker of her panic from the day before still haunting her eyes. “It can wait until after breakfast.”

“And how are you?” Michael asks.

Philippa groans lightly. “Just fine, aside from the aches from that parachute landing. Never get in a fight with the ground, Michael, it wins every time.”

The trend of mutual concern among the away team, Michael notes, continues throughout the morning. The five of them bustle in and out of the campsite, taking readings and working on equipment, but no one ranges too far out of reach of any of the others. A few hours after waking up, Michael heads over to the campsite kitchen area to make herself an early lunch so that she has a chance to talk to Sylvia, who is making herself another cup of coffee, only to turn around and nearly bump into Philippa hovering behind her, seconds before Keyla rounds the corner of the shuttle to join them, Joann’s arm around her waist. It is as though no one on the away team quite wants to let any of the others go.

As she settles herself by the fire with her tea and ration bars, Michael smiles. Sylvia is once again at work on the replicator, the clinks and clunks of tools and equipment intermingling with her quiet, contented cursing. Philippa and Joann are passing the time by idly trying to set up a second long-range communicator, and Keyla is loudly keeping them all updated on her progress as she tries to use a tin of tomatoes and two carbohydrate ration bars to make herself a sandwich.

An orange leaf drifts down into Michael’s lap, and she picks it up, twirling it lightly between her fingers and gazing up into the brilliant blue sky. This is about as far as it is possible to get from the sterile white of a Federation prison cell, both geographically and psychologically. As Keyla and Sylvia swear simultaneously over capacitors and tomatoes, Michael finds herself thinking again of how she felt, stranded on a rock in the middle of a rushing, freezing river, alone and in danger and yet, thanks to Keyla and Sylvia’s proffered reassurance and friendship, feeling something close to safe.

There has been, she realizes, a question lingering in the back of her mind, subtle but insistent, every day since her release from prison onto the Discovery. A question that, she suspects, is universal to the aftermath of, well, anything bad, really.

_Am I really safe now?_

_Could it happen again?_

Months ago, she wouldn’t have even acknowledged the question; her belief that she wholly deserved to be in prison in the first place would have made it feel almost immoral to think of being confined to prison as something that had happened to her, rather than something she had done to herself. Now, the question nudges against her more audibly, spurred on by the slow lifting, over her time on the Discovery, of some of her guilt for the tens of thousands of lives lost in the war.

_Am I really safe now?_

_Could it happen again?_

Michael had thought that she had never seen Philippa as angry as she was when she first heard about Michael’s life sentence, but that had turned out to be be nothing compared to the cold rage in her eyes weeks later when Michael had, after a few gentle questions, told her, in a few quiet sentences, some of what she told Keyla yesterday.

 _You will never face that again,_ Philippa had said, more than once, over the next few days. _Michael, we will never let something like that happen to you again._

But Philippa had been just one person, the ‘we’ she referred to nebulous and made up of people who, Michael felt, might or might not care all that much about Michael herself, at the end of the day.

Now, sitting in front of a smoldering fire in the middle of a carefully-organized campsite on an alien planet, Michael at last feels like she is surrounded by that ‘we;’ a group of kind, courageous people who...care. About her.

About Michael.

As she is.

Care about her, in a way that cannot be erased. Not by freezing water, or sterile white walls, or silence.

Taking another sip of tea, Michael smiles.

_Yes._

_I am safe._

 

Sylvia snaps the tricorder shut and leans back against a tree, gazing out at her landscape around them. “Pretty, isn’t it?”

She and Joann are sitting at the bank of the river, waiting for the sensors in the water to finish picking up data, Georgiou having decreed, at Michael’s urging, that the away mission’s status is stable enough for a bit of the surveying that sent them on this mission in the first place. Joann was unsurprised when Sylvia nobly balked at the suggestion that she join Joann for some fun science rather than continuing to work on repairs. Georgiou, however, just gave her a look, and thirty minutes later, here they are at the river.

“It really is.” Joann leans against her own tree, closing her eyes. She is exhausted, still, she realizes. And rattled, and sad, underneath the happiness and relief of the away team’s reunion, all the feelings finally hitting her at once now that the team has a moment to breathe.

“You okay, Joann?” Sylvia asks in concern.

Joann opens one eye and shoots Sylvia a reassuring smile. “Yes. Just all the stress and—all the stress hitting me at once, you know how it is.”

Sylvia nods sympathetically, then frowns. “‘And’?”

Joann opens her mouth and closes it again.

“You don’t have to tell me, if you don’t want to,” Sylvia says hastily. “Just. You know. You can, if you want to.”

Joann smiles at her, touched. “Thanks, Sylv.”

Sylvia smiles and ducks her head, waggling her shoulders up and down in a sweetly abashed half-shrug.

“It’s nothing, really,” Joann says. “Captain Georgiou is an excellent person to get stranded on an alien planet with, but we had some conversations about hard things, and I guess I’m just still a little sad about some of the things she said to me.”

To late, she realizes that in her attempt to avoid disclosing that the true source of her sadness is witnessing her captain’s nightmares, she has made it sound like Georgiou chewed her out for something.

“She wouldn’t have said anything mean to you?” Sylvia asks, eyes wide, then answers herself seconds later. “She wouldn’t have said anything mean to you. But did you argue, or did you disagree on what to do on the mission, or—”

“No, no, we didn’t argue at all,” Joann says hastily. “Working together was very nice, actually, just…”

She pauses, trying to figure out what to say. In the enclosed world of a starship, the balance of where keeping someone’s personal information in confidence ends and confiding in an unrelated friend begins tends to lean far more toward the former. There are, after all, no truly unrelated friends to be found on a starship, and so Joann has mentioned, for instance, Keyla’s nightmares only in letters to her best friend back on Earth, and only nonspecifically even then.

But in the enclosed world of a starship, where communication with friends and family outside the ship is only occasional, there remains the need to give and receive support from the people around you. Sylvia and Joann are good friends, and so Joann has confided in her, nonspecifically and with Keyla’s permission, that Keyla still experiences trauma symptoms from the war--as does everyone on the Discovery, after all, to one degree or another.

Now, Joann is realizing that the whole question is magnified times several thousand when the original confidant is a superior officer; Joann is hardly about to spill Georgiou’s personal information with any degree of specificity. Choosing her words carefully, she says, “Captain Georgiou and I talked about Starfleet and wars and conflicts, now and in the past, and I could see that the things she’s been through in the past still affect her. On one hand it’s nice to have an example of how someone who seems so strong is going through the same stuff all of us are going through, but also, I guess it made me realize that I think of trauma—of Keyla’s trauma symptoms—as something that will have an endpoint some day. And it’s hard being reminded that no one ever gets to completely, one hundred percent leave that stuff behind.”

Sylvia stares at her. “Oh. Oh, okay. Okay, that makes sense, yeah.”

Joann smiles at her. “Thanks, Sylv.”

Sylvia nods. “Well, I’m—I’m, I'm sorry you’re going through that, being reminded of that. Because that sucks, it really does. I mean, we’re all going through that, I guess, worrying about each other and ourselves, and I know from what I read about trauma in the, the self-help readings they sent everyone right after the war ended that it’s important to know you’re not alone with trauma, or, or with secondary trauma, anybody else’s trauma, either. So, you know you can talk to me, right? Just like you say I can talk to you.”

Joann smiles at her again. “I know. And I’m glad you know you can talk to me.”

Sylvia smiles. “Yeah. I do know I can! And I appreciate it.” She sobers slightly. “It does really, really suck, seeing someone else hurting, doesn’t it?”

Joann suspects she is thinking of Michael, her own close friend. Joann doesn’t know Michael very well, beyond personal regard and professional respect, but she likes and admires her, and even the bare amount of knowledge she has about Michael’s wartime experiences is enough to make her shiver. Michael has truly been through hell many times over, and Sylvia is one of her closest friends, someone trying to support her through all that.

“Yes,” she says gently. “It really sucks, and it really hurts.”

Sylvia gives her a tight, lopsided smile of thanks, and they sit in silence for a moment.

“And it’s so...so complicated,” Joann adds. She hasn’t talked about this in any depth with Sylvia or anyone else, not for months. “Trying to support someone else, and trying to reach out for support yourself, all in a way that’s good and healthy and okay. I mean, I think at this point in life, now that we’re all adults, we’ve all had at least one friendship or relationship where it was too unbalanced, one person giving too much of the support for too long--I mean, obviously if one person is going through something they’re going to need more support, but there needs to be some kind of reciprocity in the longterm, you know? And some of us--Keyla and me, anyway--we’re conscious of trying to avoid that. And, I mean, that’s better than the alternative! Better than people who never realize they need to stop giving or taking so much! But it adds this other layer, of both of us trying to make sure it’s balanced, and that makes things more complicated, too.” She sighs. “There’s just a lot to think about, sometimes. So it’s really tempting to think that there is a, a finish line. But there isn’t.”

Sylvia bites her lip. “I’m sorry,” she says finally.

“I mean, there is a getting-much-better line!” Joann adds. “There absolutely _is_ a happy ending in sight to the times when things are _really_ bad. It _will_ get much better. I’m not trying to imply that things getting much better isn’t possible at all.”

“Yeah.” Sylvia nods. “Things really are gonna get much better. Which is what you just said. So I know you know that. But just... _for real,_ Joann, things are, _really_ are going to get better and easier over time, as we get farther and farther away from the war, and people heal and everything, and then as more people are feeling better, more people will have more time and energy and coping skills to be able to support other people and help other people feel better, so, like, a graph of how everyone is doing won’t just have a positive derivative, it will have a positive second derivative, too.”

Joann laughs, imagining the curve of a ‘How Well Everyone Is Doing’ graph sloping upwards, rising more and more as time moves along. “I like it,” she says.

Sylvia grins.

Joann closes her eyes, picturing the line, rising. “You know,” she says, “that puts me in mind of asymptotes. I mean, I don’t think Discovery’s ‘How Well Everyone Is Doing’ line will ever quite be vertical enough to be an asymptote with the y axis, but...I like the idea that, when it comes to trauma recovery, the goal is the line becoming an asymptote.” She glances back toward the camp. “Like, it will never make it all the way to the y axis. You won’t ever reach a point where you’re totally, magically, one hundred percent _recovered_. But the line of how you’re doing will get close enough to be an asymptote to the finish line, so close that it’s mathematically indistinguishable from having reached it.”

She stares into space, amazed to find that her feelings about what she watched Captain Georgiou go through are shifting almost entirely from what they were at the time.

Yes, was comforting, at the time, to see Georgiou asking for help, and made Joann feel less ashamed of how she has been trying to do the same. And of course Joann had thought that Georgiou was strong, not weak, for being in pain and making her way through it. But the incident as a whole had felt neither hopeful nor positive. At the time, it had felt like Joann was watching a tragedy, a strong and good person hurting and in pain.

Now, she thinks of how Georgiou--stranded with a near-stranger on an alien world, hungry, in pain, in danger, lightyears from home, knowing that someone she loved might be dead--woke from a visibly draining nightmare that Joann suspects sent her back to times that were even worse, and then promptly was able to ask for support in a way that she clearly knew worked for her-- _touch helps_ \--in a way that was conscious of Joann’s boundaries and needs-- _or if you can’t do that, maybe some water._ And then the support she had asked for, and whatever she had thought about to comfort herself in the quiet minutes that followed, calmed her enough that only minutes after waking from a nightmare in the middle of an away mission gone terrifyingly wrong, she had dropped right back off to sleep.

And it wasn’t even a coincidence that Joann had been there to hold her hand, was it? Georgiou had chosen to be in Starfleet; chosen to make a community in an organization of people who--at best--were committed to a certain baseline level of compassion and competence. Not to mention that she had probably saved Joann’s life half a day before, a lifetime of training and experience and...professional growth, in a very dangerous profession...leading her to shove a parachute pack at Joann as Joann tried to get the shuttle under control.

Even at a vulnerable moment in a terrifying situation, Georgiou’s choices and knowledge and what must have been years of work and growth had enabled her to have what she needed to be okay.

Joann blinks. The memory of what she watched Georgiou endure and do no longer feels like a snapshot of tragedy so much as...well, a snapshot of tragedy, still, but also, simultaneously, a snapshot of success.

And maybe, even more than she had realized at the time, a reason for hope.

“You okay, Joann?” Sylvia asks, forehead furrowed, bringing Joann, blinking, back to the present.

“Yes. Yes!” Joann grins. “Sorry. I was just...thinking about it all. I like your calc metaphor, Sylvia.” She swoops her hand upwards, her fingertips curving a line with a positive derivative and a positive second derivative through the air.

“And I like yours!” Sylvia says. “Recovery asymptotes! _Nice!”_ She holds out her hand for a high five, and Joann obliges, grinning.

“Thank you so much for talking with me about this stuff, Sylv.”

“Oh, uh, of course, I mean, you’re really kind and perceptive and brilliant and have been an officer for longer than me, so it’s really helpful to me, too!”

“ _You’re_ brilliant, Sylvia,” Joann tells her, grinning. “A brilliant engineer and a brilliant friend.”

Sylvia ducks her head, blushing. “Ah, thanks, uh--ah, thanks Joann.” She looks up. “And...the stuff we’re talking about it, I’m working on it too, trying to figure out how to support people. And I’m not always the best at it. I know I can kind of...assume things are better than they are, sometimes, or try to make people feel better instead of just letting them feel what they feel. So, uh, it’s really helpful to hear you talk about it, Joann.”

“I’m glad. And...it’s not something that’s easy, or that any of us are born knowing how to do.” Joann smiles at her. “You’re working on it, and that’s what matters.”

Sylvia smiles back, and for a few moments they gaze out into the autumn forest in peaceful silence.

“Joann?” Sylvia looks at her seriously again, her brow furrowed with quiet intention.

“Yes?” Joann replies, waiting.

“Whatever we go through,” Sylvia says, giving Joann’s hand a pat, “and whatever our friends go through, we’re all together on the Discovery. We have each other, and we’ll keep figuring out how to support our friends. Together.”

Joann threads her fingers through Sylvia’s, smiling. “Yes. Together.”

 

“Captain?”

Philippa looks up from snapping sticks into firewood. “Yes, Lieutenant Detmer?” she asks, smiling.

Keyla smiles back. “Can I talk to you to you about something? Good thing, not bad thing,” she adds quickly, grinning.

“Of course,” Philippa says, pushing herself to her feet. Thanks to Tilly’s long-anticipated, highly-celebrated final repair of the replicator after she returned from the morning’s sensor survey, they have finally been able to start using anti-inflammatory hypos with abandon, and the ache in Philippa’s back and legs has at last melted away, her muscles feeling so much better that they’re practically singing. She can’t resist bouncing on her heels, just slightly, once she’s on her feet.

Sobering, she tells Keyla, “Actually, I need to talk to you about something as well. Also not _a_ bad thing, though perhaps addressing one.”

“Oh, ah, okay, Captain,” Keyla says, looking a bit anxious.

“Perhaps we should get that out of the way first?” Philippa asks as they step into the trees, walking away from the campsite toward the river. “I wanted to apologize to you, Lieutenant, if it seemed like I was questioning your competence or dedication yesterday when I panicked about Michael’s wellbeing.” She sighs slightly at the memory. “I...was panicking, and not thinking clearly, and if I implied that I didn’t have faith in your judgement when it came to treating Michael and performing your responsibilities as an officer, that was not my intention. I wanted to take the time to make that clear to you now.”

Keyla’s eyes widen; evidently she was not expecting this. “Oh, I, I mean—it’s fine, Captain! I mean, thank you for—I appreciate you telling me that; it’s very kind of you. But it’s totally okay.” She gives Philippa a reassuring smile. “To be fair, you were pretty lightheaded at the time.”

“To be fair,” Philippa says, smiling back.

“I mean—no offense, Captain—you were my patient at the time, too. It was pretty clear you were ill and panicking, like you said, which I haven’t seen you do much, but it happens to everyone, right?”

“Right.” Philippa nods. “Fortunately, that’s all over with now.”

Keyla smiles again. “Yes, things finally seem to be going our way on this mission. It’s so good to have everyone here safe and sound.”

Philippa smiles. “Thanks in no small part to you,” she adds over her shoulder as they pick their way through the underbrush towards the sound of the river. “I also wanted to commend you, Lieutenant, for your treatment of Michael’s symptoms when she was became back. The care you took of her was exemplary.”

Keyla bursts into tears.

Philippa wheels back around to face her, and for an instant she only stares at her, startled, before her brain kicks back into gear, processing what is in front of her.

Keyla, sobbing, shaking, bawling her eyes out, swiping at her eyes with shaking palms and looking as shocked by her own shuddering sobs as Philippa initially was.

All right.

Philippa glances to her right, where a fallen log lies a few meters away. “All right, let’s just head over here,” she says soothingly, gesturing with one hand and heading for the log. Keyla stumbles after her.

“I’m—I’m sorry, Captain, I don’t know what’s wrong I don’t I don’t— _I don’t usually do this_ —" Keyla is struggling to get the words out between torrential sobs. “I’m sorry, I don’t—“

“It’s okay,” Philippa tells her, keeping her tone calm and soothing as they sink onto the log. “I’ve seen this many, _many_ times, Lieutenant. It’s normal to fall apart after keeping it together during a hard time. It’s so very, very normal. Even if you go through a lot of hard things and don’t fall apart after any of them,” she adds, “maybe there’s particular thing, or you finally feel particularly safe, and then it all comes out. It’s normal,” she soothes.

“Normal—“ Keyla echoes through her gasping, full-body sobs. “Thank you—I’m sorry—thank you—” she manages. She grinds the heels of her hands against her eyes, but the tears keep coming.

 _This is really laying her out right now,_ Philippa observes, watching her and feeling something light and strange twist in her chest at the probable reason for the magnitude of Keyla’s current meltdown. At the times when Philippa has fallen apart like this, it has frequently been due to the presence of someone who made her feel absolutely safe, and it always feels strange--strange, and heavy, and gratifying, and unnerving, and hopeful--when Philippa realizes that _she_ is that person to someone else in turn.

To Keyla, she says, “Everything’s going to be okay.” Keyla looks up at her, and Philippa continues gently, “It’s okay to cry. Just let it out. It’s okay.”

“Thanks—” Keyla says between sobs. “Sorry—”

Philippa makes soft sounds of reassurance, and Keyla’s sobs rise into a whimpering, keening wail. She clenches her fingers around her kneecaps, rocking back and forth as her wail subsides back into sniffling sobs.

“Would you like a hug?” Philippa asks.

Keyla looks up, tilting slightly toward Philippa, as though she is having to calculate less whether or not she wants the hug and more whether her commanding officer is really offering her a hug and whether she is really going to accept it. A few seconds later, she nods, and Philippa stretches out her arms. If she knew Keyla better and had more of a sense of whether she would want the hug or not, she might have simply half-opened her arms to begin with, but for someone she doesn’t know as well—and who is a servicemember under her command, no less—a verbal question makes it easier, she thinks, for Keyla to either accept or simply shake her head no.

Keyla sinks forward into Philippa’s arms, a fresh wave of choking sobs overtaking her as she leans against Philippa. “Oh, god,” she whimpers, sobbing, and then, sounding out the words as though realizing them for the first time, “I was _so scared_ …”

Philippa strokes her hair. “I know,” she says softly. “I know.”

“I was _so scared,”_ Keyla says again, her body shaking with sobs, and Philippa has a feeling that her tears aren’t, really, just about this mission, any more than the tears that prick the corners of her own eyes are.

She strokes Keyla’s hair again. “You did so well, Keyla,” she says gently. “You went through so much while I was gone, and when I read about all you accomplished during the war, I was so impressed by what you were able to accomplish, through it all. You did so much, and you went through so much, and it’s normal for it to hurt like hell. It’s normal. It’s normal. It’s okay.”

Keyla murmurs something that might be _thank you,_ lost in a sob, and Philippa holds her, making soft reassuring noises and hoping that she is giving Keyla the space she needs to process a little more of her pain. Mourning is never a one-time event, and no matter how much support Keyla has been getting from her partner and friends, Philippa knows that it never hurts to add another trustworthy confidant to the complex dance of giving and receiving support; leaning on different people who also need to lean on you.

“It’s okay,” she murmurs. “It’s okay.”

Keyla’s sobs are quieting slightly, and Philippa closes her eyes, feeling her own gratitude for this moment; for Keyla’s trust and for the opportunity to comfort someone in her orbit who is hurting.

She is aware of the danger of overextending herself, of trying to save everyone, a balance she sought all her life. And she is cognizant that support needs to be focused on the needs of the person receiving support, rather than what the supporter wishes to give. But, approached with care, a moment like this is certainly healing for Philippa, too. Healing, and re-empowering, to have the chance to comfort someone who she was powerless to help all the months when she was...gone. Legally dead. Gone, leaving her crew and her friends and her colleagues to fight a war without her.

From the moment she woke in the hospital and learned what had happened, Philippa’s arms have ached to hold and comfort the people she had unwillingly left behind. Now, in this moment, what Keyla most needs from her is that which she most yearns to give, and so she lets Keyla cry, and she holds her.

A few minutes later, Keyla sniffles one more time and peels herself away from Philippa’s shoulder, smiling softly in gratitude. “Thank you, Captain. I’m—sorry for melting down on you, but—thank you.”

“Of course,” Philippa says gently. “It’s okay. I have known you for--” She hesitates just a moment, hopefully not long enough to show, as she considers whether or not to count her lost year-- “five years, and I have never seen you cry on shift. After going through everything you’ve been through these past two years, a bit of a meltdown...that’s just how surviving terrible things works.”

“I remember,” Keyla says, “how you used to talk about that, back on the Shenzhou. After we’d been through a particularly bad crisis, or after we’d lost someone. You would say that it was normal for it all to hit you afterward, after the crisis was over and things were safe.”

“Well, listen to your captain, then,” Philippa says cheerfully, and the corner of Keyla’s mouth tugs upward in amusement.

Philippa feels that something else needs to be said here, and she thinks for a minute, arranging her thoughts into words. “If you’ve been finding yourself having trauma symptoms...nightmares, flashbacks, sadness...that are hard to deal with, day to day, I hope you’ve been able to seek the support you need,” she tells her. “I don’t want it to be said that I went too far telling you that crying is normal, if it’s something that’s happening more often than I see. Breaking down once or twice after you’re safe, though, that’s just par for the course regardless of other symptoms,” she finishes. “That’s just being human.”

Keyla looks slightly amused at Philippa’s last words, pinching her lips together and glancing away for a fraction of a second as though smiling at a private joke. A moment later, though, she is looking back at Philippa, her expression serious. “I…” She fiddles with the edge of her uniform with one hand. “I...have been...dealing with that kind of thing. I think a lot of us have been. But I am reading about it and stuff, and trying to deal with it, and talking about it with people. Counsellors are stretched a little thin, right now, but I’ve been seeing one as much as they can schedule it.”

Philippa sighs. “I know they are.” This is a source of deep consternation to her, but there isn’t much she can do about it. At least Starfleet Medical’s counselling division has been up in arms enough to be driving plenty of initiatives, from recruiting new students to developing a fast-track program for peer counselors to distributing self-help materials throughout Starfleet. “I’m--I’m so glad to hear that, Keyla, that you’ve been able to find some support. I’m proud of you.”

“Thank you, Captain,” says Keyla, looking only mildly embarrassed at the personal topic of conversation. “And, uh, thank you again. For being there for me--well, all these years, really, but especially today. I’m sorry I got your shoulder all wet,” she adds, with a trace of a smile.

Philippa chuckles. “Don’t worry, Lieutenant. This uniform has seen far worse on this away mission,” she says, and Keyla laughs, one more tear escaping the corner of her eye. She dashes it away, smiling, and combs a hand through her messy hair, smoothing it away from her cortical implant and tucking escaped strands behind her other ear.

Philippa smiles again, pleasantly relieved to see Keyla bouncing back from her meltdown, even if on a logical level she knows the tears were necessary. It isn’t exactly fun to watch someone in pain, and it’s admittedly nice to be reminded that even the overwhelming pain of such a moment of meltdown will not last forever.

Philippa has not broken down over the war or her lost year yet herself. She has mourned and wept and raged over a few aspects of the situation, yes, to one degree or another, at various times. She has grieved for lost friends, and she has begun to confront some of her fury and shame over what the organization she willingly serves-- _the organization I thought we’d_ worked on _and made fucking_ better--had done to Michael.

But no emotions of significant magnitude about her own lost year have hit her yet, and she knows enough about how pain and trauma work--in general, and for herself--to know that that only means that such feelings are oncoming. It sometimes feels like a cresting wave, lurking in her future, but given that she can’t exactly schedule “tell brain to begin comprehending and mourning this latest terrible thing” on the calendar, there is nothing she can do but wait. Wait, and prepare herself for how hard the wave will probably hit when it crashes into her.

Until then, she can only keep attempting to build her post-war life on the Discovery, keep dealing with the various everyday symptoms of trauma and grief, and wait for whatever her mind is waiting for; for whatever level of safety and stability her brain will register as the crisis having ended and the aftermath of the crisis having begun.

At least she knows what is coming and, broadly speaking, how she will deal with it. With an understanding of what is happening--finally, after a lifetime of learning to navigate pain, with an understanding of what is happening. And without trying to deal with it alone.

Keyla lets out a long, shaky sigh, smiling at Philippa, and Philippa smiles back. “Now,” she says, “what was it that you wanted to talk about?”

 

Joann is helping Michael reorganize the campsite’s ‘things that broke in the crash but can possibly be fixed’ area--Michael and Sylvia have forbidden anyone from organizing or, as Sylvia refers to it, disorganizing their repair area itself--when Sylvia bounces over to them. “Afternoon away mission meeting in five!”

Joann smiles, finishing sorting tricorders into a crate and brushing the dust off her uniform before offering Michael a hand up from where she sits sorting sensor equipment. Michael must not consider the assist part of being fussed over for her hypothermia ordeal, because she accepts Joann’s hand with equanimity, and the two of them head towards the rest of the away team.

“All right, why don’t we have the meeting over _here_ , by this rock?” Philippa suggests, gesturing toward a wide, flat rock near the edge of the campsite.

Joann squints at her, trying to divine the intention behind the suspiciously specific suggestion, but there is nothing but casual cheerfulness in Philippa’s manner as she leads them to the rock and gracefully sides beside it. Joann, Keyla, Sylvia and Michael follow suit.

For the next few minutes, they run through the list of recurring and one-time tasks to be completed over the course of the next twelve-plus hours until the Discovery finds them. As the meeting wraps up, Joann jokes that this whole away mission reminds her of Academy training in the forests of North America--“I mean, they even drop you off with no vehicle and make you hike down a mountain with minimal supplies, to prepare you for exactly this situation!”--and Sylvia points out that, given that the locations for that particular training were switched between Joann’s time at the Academy and Sylvia’s, Sylvia’s mountain was steeper than Joann’s.

Joann hasn’t realized that Keyla has disappeared from the table until her voice calls from behind them, “Joann? Close your eyes!”

Slightly nonplussed, Joann glances at her commanding officer for permission. Philippa nods, biting back a grin, and Joann closes her eyes.

She can hear the sound of footsteps approaching, then a few clinks and thunks, and then Keyla’s voice, coming from a meter or so in front of her, says, “Open!”

Joann opens her eyes. On the flat rock in front of her is a steaming teapot and two cups, along with a small vase containing a cluster of brightly colored leaves from the forest around them.

“Happy anniversary,” Keyla says, grinning. “It isn’t a pumpkin spice latte, but Sylvia got some hot apple cider out of the synthesizer, and I thought that was seasonal enough.”

Joann stares at the teaset, then at Keyla, feeling tears fill her eyes.

“The PSL is a custom synthesizer file, so we don’t have it with us,” Sylvia is saying apologetically.

Joann grins, wiping her eyes on her sleeve. “Given that the two of us don’t really like pumpkin and coffee respectively, this may have worked out for the best. Thank you, Keyla. Thank you, all of you,” she adds.

“Don’t thank us yet,” Michael says, lifting her clasped hands from her lap. “I heard from someone who heard from someone that you both had lovely new outfits planned for the big day, and crashing onto an alien planet is no reason to forgo fashion.” She pulls her hands apart, revealing what turns out to be a thin circular chain of autumn leaves and carved pumpkins, clipped from what Joann recognizes as an orange ration bar wrapper. Gently, she places the circle over Joann’s head, then unfolds a second necklace, lowering it around Keyla.

Joann laughs in disbelief as Keyla’s eyes widen; evidently this part of the celebration is a surprise to her as well.

“Thank you, Michael,” Keyla says, beaming.

“Breathtaking,” Georgiou confirms, leaning back to look at them both with a broad grin. “Don’t look at me,” she adds, “I don’t have a present. I keep the secrets and scout the table location, that’s all.”

Joann throws her arms around her. “Thank you, Captain,” she murmurs into Georgiou’s shoulder as Georgiou hugs her tightly back.

“You’ll notice,” Sylvia says cheerfully, as Joann and Georgiou draw apart, smiling at each other, “that there are only two cups. That’s because the three of us are going to have our own _much cooler_ celebration over _there_ while you two lovebirds have your date.”

Keyla laughs. “As though you could ever be cool, Sylv.”

“Hey,” Sylvia warns as she rises to her feet. “Do you want to find a spanner in your bunk tonight?”

“As your technical commanding officer, I’m banning any spanners in any unexpected locations,” Michael groans as she and Philippa get to their feet.

“Their ‘technical commanding--’? And what am I?” Philippa demands in mock outrage.

“I was their commanding officer for the first twenty-four hours of this away mission; I have a moral responsibility to keep them from embarrassing themselves.”

“Anyway, what do you all want?” Sylvia asks Michael and Georgiou proudly as the three of them head toward the synthesizer. “This guy is at my command now, so the entire galaxy of drinks is at our disposal.”

“Well, it’s too late in the day for coffee, so I’m going to go for a real hot chocolate.”

“Philippa, you _always_ have hot chocolate. Don’t you ever feel like being seasonal?”

“Michael, I grew up in Langkawi and you grew up at the edge of the Vulcan desert, so it isn’t as though either of us has nostalgic memories of deciduous foliage and apple orchards. Besides, we live in space; we don’t have seasons.”

“We’re not in space right now.”

“Aren’t we all, _always,_ in space, though, really?” Sylvia chimes in.

“Well, that depends on whether...”

Joann grins at Keyla as their colleagues’ voices fade behind them. “Thank you, Keyla,” she says again.

“Thank _you_ , Joann,” Keyla murmurs. She is gazing at Joann as though she can’t tear her eyes away, and as always, Joann feels her heart flip over at the sight of Keyla looking at her--at her!--that way. “Thank you for the most wonderful six months in the cosmos. Thank you for giving me the sweetest compliments, and talking about sudoku with my grandma, and being there for me when I can’t sleep, and kicking Rhys’s ass at darts, and getting so into our ridiculous date ideas, and being so principled and professional and kind on duty that it reminds me every day of why I stay in Starfleet.”

“Oh, Keyla…” Joann swallows. “Thank you for being the best girlfriend in the universe. Thank you for letting me complain about having to work with crappy data, and bringing me tea at lunch, and getting everyone together for shore leave shenanigans, and listening to me talk about the war, and being brave and principled and heroic and doing the right thing even through everything.”

They both spend a moment blinking back tears, and Keyla reaches for Joann’s hand, squeezing it as her eyes well over. A leaf drifts perilously close to Keyla’s cider, then, and Keyla pulls away to yank her cup out of its path, laughing.

Joann snickers. “This planet has it in for your cider, Kay.”

“Like I said this morning, his whole escapade hasn’t exactly been the anniversary we planned,” Keyla says ruefully.

“Yeah, I can’t believe I got a PFL instead of a PSL.”

Keyla snorts. “Been saving that pun, have you?”

“Since I was in the air.”

Keyla shakes her head, staring at Joann with stars in her eyes. “Joann?”

“Yes?”

“I love you.”

Joann smiles. “I love _you_.”

Keyla beams at her, then takes another sip of cider. “We have some pretty great colleagues, don’t we?” she asks, gazing happily at the steaming cup.

Joann thinks of Michael climbing out of the shuttle to save Keyla and Sylvia, Georgiou telling Joann stories of her past in Starfleet, Sylvia squeezing her hand. “We do. We really, really do.” She sighs, staring up into the azure sky. “This definitely isn’t how I thought this week would go. Or how I thought my assignment to the Discovery would go. Or...well, how I thought my life would go, really. But even after everything that’s happened, we do all seem to have quite a knack for making things work out, in our own ways, don’t we?”

Keyla grins. “Including your and my very autumnal date. A day after our actual anniversary. On a planet that technically has two seasons, so who knows if this counts as autumn or not.”

Joann raises her cup. “Happy almost-autumn?”

“Happy almost-autumn.” Keyla grins, and they clink cups.

A light gust of wind sends a scattering of orange and golden leaves swirling down toward them, and Joann laughs, catching one out of the air and tucking it into the little bouquet. “Happy anniversary, Keyla.”

“Happy anniversary,” Keyla whispers, leaning over to kiss Joann lightly on the lips. “Here’s to the next sixth months.”

Joann kisses her on the nose, making her giggle, before pulling apart to pour them each more cider.

“I do love you,” Keyla says softly. “So much.”

Joann looks up again. “I love you, too.”

Keyla beams, and Joann smiles back, feeling love and hope and gratitude flooding through her as she sits beside the woman she loves at the edge of a forest both alien and familiar, leaves twirling and drifting around them under the brilliant blue bowl of the sky.


End file.
